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It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

He must be humble of heart, strong of arm,
Be savage in war, loyal to hearth,
And follow deeds of Glory.
He must keep honour with all,
Banish cowardice from his doings,
And bring his House no shame.
He must serve the Emperor,
And defend the Imperium.
Thus should a Knight rule himself.

The Chivalric Duty, Aquitainus
Malory Cadmus, M31

TELLURUS

Making children cry was a sacred duty to Raym Bartaum. He regarded the scale of their tearful sobs and the volume of their snot as a measure of how well he was doing his job. The sound of a nine year-old in tears as he struggled to reload an autogun with frostbitten fingers was music to his ears.

It was the sound of them learning not to make the mistake that had seen them brought before him ever again.

‘Give me the child, and I will mould the man,’ had been his favourite riposte when do-gooding nobles evinced squeamishness at his methods.

Leave the inspirational crap to Kaytein. Raym had become a drill abbot to scare a thousand tonnes of hell out of each and every progena that came through Scholam Vikara.

And scaring them was easy.

The Imperium was a frightening place, after all.

Frightening for trained Guardsmen, let alone young children sent to a grim, granite-faced scholam with their parents freshly dead or so far away they might as well be.

And once he’d shown them just how bad everything else in the galaxy was, he taught them to be even worse. He taught them to be stronger than the things that wanted them dead. He taught them how to fight.

Yes, scaring progena was easy, but nothing he’d ever shown or told them of bloodthirsty xenoforms, Traitors or warp-spawned monsters had scared them quite as much as the sight of his terror was doing right now.

Raym Bartaum was terrified because he knew what was coming.

He had a cybernetic arm and adamantium plates replacing half his pitted skull to remind him just how bad things were going to get.

The scholam yard was the size of a good-sized regimental assembly ground, which, come rain, sun or snow it was, six days out of seven. A mix of heavy supply trucks, groundcars and a couple of stripped-down Chimeras used for training gunned their engines by the opened Proximus Gate. Slow, lumbering things, none had speed enough to outpace the approaching enemy.

Thudding explosions sounded from beyond the scholam walls, bouncing echoes making it impossible to tell from where in the city the sound originated. Raym heard the rattle of small arms fire, the heavier thud of artillery and the unmistakable sound of dying soldiers.

Twelve years had passed since Raym had set foot on a real battlefield, fifteen since he’d heard the screeching howls of this particular foe.

But there were some sounds you never forgot; some sounds that could still bring a decorated veteran out in cold sweat and make him want to eat the barrel of his bolt pistol.

Children were spilling from the cloisters of the scholam, barely dressed and fumbling with their rifle slings. The youngest was barely six, the oldest approaching his maturity.

And every single one of them was going to die here.

They flinched at the crash of artillery fire from deeper in the city and stared in horror at the distant smudges of black smoke rising in the distance.

Raym’s fellow drill abbots herded their charges towards the waiting vehicles. Military-grade voices shouted at the youngsters; parade-ground trained, audible even over the scholam’s bells and the ululating sirens blaring from the city walls of Vikara.

The progena were chased by profanity Raym had last heard in a Catachan brothel and switches to beat the backs of those moving too slowly. His own class were already following at his heels. Just like the first day they had come to him, most were blubbering in fear. Others were too terrified to even cry.

They were a good bunch now; the softest clay beaten and then built into what he’d hoped would be the finest warriors, statesmen, generals or inquisitors of the Imperium. They’d hated him at first; oh, how they’d hated him.

Two of them had even tried to kill him.

But they’d learned to respect him. And as they grew and saw who they had become, they understood just what he’d made of them and were grateful.

Raym looked up as a squadron of aircraft roared overhead. Too fast to see what kind. Lightnings most likely. Dogfighters, which meant the enemy was almost here.

‘Hurry it up, damn you!’ he shouted, hoping his angry tone would mask his fear. He hauled down the tailgate of the first truck. Something exploded beyond the walls of the scholam. A greenish fireball painted the sky.

Children scrambled aboard, the older ones helping the youngest. Raym was gratified to see the disciplined control in their faces. Fear as well, but no panic.

‘Are they coming to rescue us?’ asked Morlay, a promising young lad with pinched cheeks and the potential to be a quality leader of men.

‘Rescue us?’ snapped Raym, turning his fear into an authoritative bark. ‘Don’t be soft, lad. Why would Lord Ohden send troops to save our sorry arses when he’s a war to fight? Every Guardsman with a gun will be heading to the walls.’

‘No one’s coming?’ said a sandy-haired girl named Lorza.

Tough and uncompromising, if she hadn’t made the cut for interrogator training, Raym would have been outraged. Right now she looked like a frightened ten year-old.

‘Why would they? We’re no priority at all. Just a bunch of half-trained orphans and cripples. We’re hungry mouths, dead weight,’ said Raym, raising his voice so others could hear. ‘So if they won’t come for us, we’re going to have to do this ourselves, right? We’re going to have to uphold the grand traditions of Scholam Vikara at the end of a lasgun and on the edge of a combat blade.’

Some of the younger ones cheered, but the older ones saw through his bravado.

The last of the progena were aboard, and Raym slammed the tailgate shut. He dropped the locking bolt into place and slapped his hand on the vehicle’s side.

‘All aboard!’

The far wall of the scholam buckled as something enormous slammed into it. Heavy blocks tumbled to the parade ground and cracks split the masonry from the foundations upwards.

‘Go!’ he shouted, and the truck belched a filthy cloud of engine smoke. Its tyres spun on gravel as Raym heard the frenzied scrape of hundreds of razor-sharp talons on stone.

They came over the wall in a chittering, screeching tide of hissing killers. Blade-limbed and sheathed in chitinous plates of glistening organic armour. Bulbous heads that were all questing tongues, needle-toothed jaws and dead, black eyes.

Hormagaunts, remembered Raym. That’s what we called them.

He heard barked orders, but they were dulled and slow, like something heard in a nightmare. Gunfire flayed the ruined wall, bursting scores of the creatures like pus-filled blisters.

It wouldn’t be enough: they were coming over in their hundreds, maybe even thousands. Then the wall buckled and collapsed as something even worse came through.

Raym had no name for it. A hulking colossus with a segmented carapace, bent low where its ram-like skull had demolished the wall. Taller than five strong men, its thorax limbs were fused horrors of drooling bio-weaponry. Caustic slime slathered its elephantine legs as it bludgeoned a way inside. Its chest spasmed with intercostal muscle contraction and hundreds of chitinous barbs spat like bullets from between its ribs. Three trucks were shredded like they’d been hosed with assault cannon fire.

Young bodies fell to the parade ground, ripped up and screaming. A Chimera exploded as a gout of corrosive bio-acid punched through its armour. A few pitiful figures tumbled from the wreckage, the flesh sloughing from their bones.

Packs of swarming alien creatures raced across the parade ground, leaping and bounding, trampling one another as their overriding biological imperative to tear and kill made them mad with a devouring, all
consuming hunger.

The colossus finally tore through the ruined wall. A pair of hooked blade limbs at least two metres long unsheathed from creamy folds of flesh at its shoulders. With its blunt, bladed snout still lowered, the behemoth charged in the midst of the pack beasts.

Raym drew his bolt pistol. He wasn’t a drill abbot now, he was a soldier of the Imperial Guard.

‘For Vikara!’ he shouted and fired his bolt pistol empty.

Ten shots, each one a kill. Not enough to make even the slightest difference, but when had that ever mattered to one of the Emperor’s finest?

And then the front line of the swarm vanished in a deafening blizzard of explosions. Sawing blasts of fire cut through the packs of shrieking monsters as they died by the score. Raym ducked back at the overwhelming noise, feeling the percussive thunder of high-calibre shells passing so close.

He crouched as something huge passed by him, towering and monstrous, a giant of adamantium and fury. With a booming cannon and a roaring chainblade for arms, it was clad in armour the colour of a winter’s sky. Blue and cold, chevroned with streaks of black and amber. A bright gonfalon streamed from its left shoulder. A rearing horse with a fluted horn at its forehead.

The giant planted its splay-clawed feet, bellowing defiance as its enormous cannon poured a relentless torrent of shells into the screaming swarm. Carapace-mounted assault weaponry sawed through the horde, cutting down what little the rapid-firing explosive ordnance left alive.

The charging colossus bellowed and bared a vast, fang-filled mouth, recognising an opponent worthy of its attention.

The armoured giant loosed an answering blast of a skirling horn and brought its long chainblade to bear. Hot vapours bled from the roaring friction of its tearing teeth. The monster spat green fire, but the giant shrugged it off with an unseen energy shield.

They came together in a crashing thunder that shook the parade ground with its fury. The giant swung its enormous blade and the beast crashed to its knees as most of its torso simply ceased to exist.

A noxious cloud of atomised alien flesh sprayed from the embedded blade’s teeth as the beast fell forward. Its limbs thrashed, still trying to raise its gutted carcass, still driven to kill by its monstrous overmind.

It bellowed in pain and hideous appetite.

The armoured giant crushed its vast skull with a final thunderous stomp. Its stubber cannons raked the ruined wall as more of the alien packs gathered for an assault. The giant’s horn skirled a blast that Raym recognised, the order to retreat under cover.

Raym took a moment to salute the giant before climbing onto the back of his truck as it pulled away. The Proximus Gate passed overhead as the driver gunned the engine. He lost sight of the giant as they turned a corner. The white of its horned-horse banner was spattered with alien blood.

Raym dropped over the tailgate and leaned against it.

‘What in the name of Ohden’s balls was that?’ said Lorza, breathless with fear and wonder.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Morlay.

Raym took a moment to catch his breath.

‘That, my lad,’ said Raym, ‘was a Knight.’

ROLAND

It never becomes any less painful. Communion with the other half of my soul should be easy, but a union of flesh and steel is no trifling matter. I feel the connection burn through the cold metal of the Throne Mechanicus. Its umbilicals thread their way into my skull and spine. It feels like every vein and cell is filling with ice water.

My throne sits within the Chamber of Echoes, a circular hall of dark stone and soaring iron girders. It is a place well named. A swelling tide of voices rises from the depths of Golem Keep’s Sanctuary and the dark ocean of the past.

The voices are many. My ancestors and companions. My judges and battle brothers. I recognise my father’s voice, stern and uncompromising, and beyond that I hear the sonorous tenor of my grandfather. Also stern and uncompromising.

In that, at least, the men of House Cadmus speak as one.

The presences of the armour’s previous occupants settle upon me like a well-worn hauberk; comforting in its steely protection, familiar in its fit. And as always, the void within me is filled with a sense of completeness.

Bonded with my Throne Mechanicus I am becoming whole.

I always tell Cordelia that she completes me, that she is the other half of my soul, and sometimes I even believe it myself. In turn, she has the good grace to allow my ego to think she believes me. She knows, as all consorts know, that a warrior of House Cadmus is only truly complete when he sits enshrined within the iron behemoth of his Knight armour.

Twenty-six warriors are enthroned alongside me in the Chamber of Echoes, a fraction of our former strength, but I lose sight of them as my throne rolls backwards and slots home in the guide rails of a vertical transit tunnel.

Darkness enfolds me and my awareness of the physical world begins to recede. Connections within my brain are rerouting to ease the neural interface with the senses of the great machine below.

The Throne Mechanicus drops, mag-lev rails hurtling it towards my waiting Knight.

I feel the movement, the rush of air, the smell of grease and lubricant, but it is distant to me. I can taste the dangerous friction of hot metal and the actinic flavour of crackling electricity, but it is flat and colourless.

My heart rate soars with excitement as seconds pass.

Then, from darkness into light.

The Vault Transcendent.

I have only a fraction of a second, too quick for even my enhanced cognition to snatch more than a fleeting impression of its enormous dimensions.

Carved into the rock of Golem Keep before the Imperium’s painful birth, the Vault Transcendent is a stone-wrought cavern of biting winds and cold light.

Here, my armour awaits.

The twenty-seven surviving Knight machines of House Cadmus stand unmoving, facing one another in two rows. Each is a bipedal giant, ten metres tall with enormous chainblades and lethal cannons slung from their shoulder mounts.

Heavy plates of olive green and jaundice yellow encase the ancient mechanisms of their bodies, and proud banners of red, gold and black waft slowly in the icy wind. A half-winged aquila ripples upon one field, a mutant’s split skull on the other.

The Throne Mechanicus rams down into my Lancer armour, the carapace sealing behind me with a clang of metal and the racketing hiss of locking bolts. Entoptic light swells around me, and I gasp with connection pain once more as the Knight’s aural sensors and the receptors of the throne mesh.

And what had been dull and distant now becomes gloriously sharp and vibrant.

Three hundred of Assembler Thexton’s hooded Sacristans kneel at our feet, binary plainsong drifting from vox-implants and their retinues of servitors. I sense the tension and hope in the Martian-trained artificers. We are bound for Vondrak at the behest of the Mechanicus, but if Thexton thinks I am returning House Cadmus to the aegis of the Red Planet, he is to be sorely disappointed.

I will not make the same mistake Godfrey made.

I have removed the Cog from our heraldry, which once again bears the Aquila of Terra.

And while I am the master of House Cadmus, it always will.

Directly across the Vault, the golden eyes of Sir Malcolm’s armour flare with connection. I raise my arms. Not the limbs of flesh and blood – they remain unmoving on my throne – but the limbs of my armour. My weapon arms, one a thermal lance, the other a battle cannon with an underslung relic blade, lift in salute.

Sir Malcolm repeats the gesture, albeit with the begrudged, teeth-gritted restraint of a rival-in-waiting.

Next to Malcolm, Sir Roderick and Sir Anthonis raise their weapons. Beside me, Sir William does the same. These are my senior Knights, my preceptors. My most trusted warriors.

Brothers for whom I would gladly lay down my life.

Hunting horns blare as the rest of the Knights slam the barrels of their cannons across the heraldic plates at their shoulders.

I turn, my senses and awareness now fully integrated with the armour. No longer am I a mortal being of flesh and bone and blood. I am a towering immortal, a beast-slaying hero from the epic lays collected in the towering stacks of Aegidius’s dusty librarius at the heart of Golem Keep.

My Knights follow as I march from the Vault Transcendent, towards the great archway engraved with the names of every warrior who has worn the green and gold down the endless millennia from antiquity to this day.

The fall of Gryphonne IV to Leviathan’s unstoppable swarms has seen the names of seventy-six Knights of House Cadmus etched into the marble. Grievous losses, heartbreaking losses. The kind of losses that might end a lesser house.

House Cadmus is not a lesser house.

Mourning banners still hang in Golem Keep’s echoing halls, but sorrow’s fist is already unclenching. The last Cull was a cathartic release of grief in an ocean of savage blood.

Many of the dead still ride with me, data ghosts haunting the circuits of my armour. Now more than ever, I feel the deep burden of responsibility at the sight of their names.

My brother Knights will feel the same.

The urge to bring honour to their legacy is hardwired into every fibre of our being. It has been thus ever since my Rite of Becoming.

Though Cordelia and the others advise against treating with the Mechanicus so soon after our emancipation, I see opportunity where others see only risk. This is why I am the master of House Cadmus. And this latest call to arms will see the newly dead avenged.

I march beneath the archway, out onto the elliptical platforms cantilevered from the sheer flanks of a mountainous plateau. A kilometre above me squats the sprawling, brooding immensity of Golem Keep. Its windowless towers and crumbling ebon palaces are grim silhouettes in the clouds, a crag of nightmares in the hearts of Raisa’s barbarous inhabitants.

A white-gold sun hangs low on the horizon, bathing the endless forests in a vaporous haze. Beneath their evergreen canopy, a degenerate race of abhuman savages eke out a wretched life in the dark. We could wipe them out with ease, but it is more amusing to allow them the semblance of existence.

Each year we slaughter thousands of them in a yearly Cull to decide who will lead House Cadmus. This year, and for the thirty-one preceding years, none have surpassed my kill-tally.

My Knights form up around me, a shield wall and marching formation all in one. They flex fibre-bundle muscles and stretch aural sensors, restless and eager for the coming fight.

Simmering in the evening heat of the setting sun, ten trans-orbital landers wait to carry us to the bulk cruisers idling in orbit. Much of our war-load is already aboard. All that remains are the Knights.

Malcolm takes position at my side. He thought he had me beaten this year, but he will have to prise my cold, dead hands from the reins of command.

I am Baron Roland, Commander of House Cadmus.

And an old enemy awaits us on Vondrak.

The Great Devourer.

Not the beasts of Leviathan, that would be too much to hope for and the universe does not play out its revenge tragedies so swiftly. No, this is a swarm that has been given a name from an ancient Terran myth cycle, the name of a many-headed beast that could only be defeated by the mightiest of heroes.

Its name is Hive Fleet Hydra.

NEMONIX

A shaven-headed flesh-thrall of the dataproctor had named this shadowed vault in a minor forge-temple as the location for their meeting. Located in the outskirts of Vondrak Ultima’s radial manufactory districts, the temple was closer to the battlefront than Arch Magos Kyrano would have liked, but the message was unequivocal.

No sooner had it been delivered than Kyrano registered the detonation of a synaptic fuse within the thrall’s brain, forever burning any memory of the message from its mind. The thrall was baseline human, with the waxy features of something grown in a vat. Scrubbed of all but the most basic DNA signatures and conception markers, it looked human, but possessed none of humanity’s vitalism. It offered no name, and a basic bio-scan revealed cognitive architecture engineered to develop a perpetual form of anterograde amnesia.

Needless precautions, thought Kyrano, but entirely in keeping with the dark rumours concerning the dataproctor cults.

The deserted forge-temple was well chosen. Every senior adept had long since fled to Vondrak Prime, leaving only an expendable skeleton staff to oversee the last data transfers from its vault.

As soon as he had offered his petition, Kyrano would join his fellow adepts. And once this business with the Binary Apostle was concluded, he would take a fast ship to Tolkhan, where the forge-synod had re-established itself in the wake of Gryphonne IV’s destruction.

The dusty archive towers to either side thrummed with the passage of information, the whirr of magnetic plates and binaric choral chants. Wall-mounted atomisers in the form of cog-toothed skulls kept the air pungent with cooling incense.

The dataproctor’s message had warned him to come alone, but Kyrano was an arch magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and a priest of his standing was seldom alone.

A low-ranked tech-priest named Uzuki was the temple’s sole remaining adept, and he had welcomed Kyrano to his humble shrine as though the Omnissiah himself had manifested before him. He’d followed Kyrano to the data vault like a faithful cyber-mastiff, assembling its six lexmechanics like some kind of honour guard.

The lexmechanics Kyrano would mind-wipe, and Uzuki’s silence could be bought with an empty promise of advancement within the Cult Mechanicus.

Assuming there was any need. The appointed time for the meeting had passed three minutes ago.

Where is he? canted Kyrano, impatiently tapping his fingertips against the matt-black surface of an archive tower. Haptic implants brought up a sheaf of glowing entoptic status panels. Even a cursory glance told Kyrano there were still thousands of zettabytes left to transfer.

‘Adept Kyrano?’ said Uzuki with a flesh-voice that betrayed his fear and lowly status all in one.

Yes, Uzuki, what is it? replied Kyrano.

The tech-priest cocked his head to the side, and Kyrano’s shoulders slumped as he recalled that Uzuki’s aural inputs were not modified for ritual levels of lingua-technis encryption. He took a moment to realign his oesophageal implants. It had been thirteen years and seven months since he had conversed with another adept in flesh-voice.

‘You have a question?’ he said, his voice rendered unfamiliar by lack of use.

‘Ah, well, yes I do, arch magos,’ said Uzuki.

‘Then ask it,’ said Kyrano when Uzuki didn’t go on.

‘Why are we still here?’

‘You have pressing business elsewhere?’

Uzuki gave him a look that said he clearly did have business elsewhere. His head bobbed up and down, fear making his flesh-voice quaver.

‘Well, yes,’ said Uzuki. ‘There’s the matter of a, um, that is, a… tyranid host en route. Shouldn’t we be beating a hasty retreat to Vondrak Prime?’

‘Not until the data transfer is complete,’ said Kyrano.

‘Of course, arch magos,’ said Uzuki. ‘The data transfer will take at least another ten hours to complete, but, well, you see… I, well, I took the initiative, so to speak, to reroute some automation protocols from the noosphere and splice them to the lexmechanics’ cortexes. There is no need for you or I to remain.’

Despite himself, Kyrano was impressed, but the infuriating lack of precision in Uzuki’s language offended him to the extent that he briefly considered mind-wiping him along with the lexmechanics. Bad form to take such drastic action against a fellow adept of the Cult Mechanicus, but he felt sure no one who had ever met Uzuki would condemn him.

‘We evacuate when I decide we are done, Adept Uzuki,’ said Kyrano. ‘If this damned adept ever turns up.’

‘He’s already here,’ a voice said from the darkness. ‘And I told you to come alone.’

Despite his extreme deviations from the baseline human template, Kyrano still jumped at the sudden, unexpected sound.

‘An arch magos does not easily travel alone,’ he said.

‘There’s truth in that,’ allowed the disembodied voice. ‘Very well. One mind, eight minds? It makes no difference.’

A figure ghosted from between two of the archive towers, and Kyrano’s ocular implants whirred as they struggled to focus.

‘Adept Nemonix?’ said Kyrano.

‘You were expecting someone else?’

‘No, but I am linked to every system of this temple, and I registered no entry,’ said Kyrano. ‘In fact, your presence is not registering at all. On any level. Why is that?’

The figure kept to the shadows, but Kyrano had the discomfiting feeling that even were he standing in the full glare of a sodium lamp, there would be just as little to see.

‘Being a ghost in the machine has its advantages,’ said the dataproctor, as though being invisible to the multifarious auspex built into every facet of a forge-temple’s structure was a minor thing. ‘Not least of which is the freedom to travel without footprints of any kind.’

Kyrano ached to know more but restrained his natural instinct for questions. He let the subject drop for now. More important matters had brought him to this place.

‘I have need of your order’s services,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Nemonix.

‘What is it you think you know?’

‘More than you would like, arch magos,’ said Nemonix. ‘Enough to see your every achievement stripped from you by the forge-synod, I can assure you of that. But shall we forgo threats, reveals and counter-reveals, the preening and the outrage? The unveiling of dark secrets between brother cults of the Mechanicus benefits no one. Agreed?’

Kyrano nodded.

‘Very good,’ continued the dataproctor, stepping into the light. ‘Then let’s crank to the hub of the cog.’

Kyrano flinched as Nemonix flickered like a negative exposure on a pict-plate, a ghost image that faded a heartbeat later, as though he were an adept-shaped hole in the world.

‘How are you doing that?’ demanded Kyrano.

‘If I didn’t tell you on Graia or Triplex Phall, what makes you think I’ll tell you now?’

Kyrano consulted his data-coils and shook his head.

‘You and I have never met, Adept Nemonix.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Nemonix, with a soft sound Kyrano interpreted as laughter. ‘Our paths have crossed six times previous to this, arch magos.’

‘You are mistaken.’

‘No, you’ve just forgotten, as you will again.’

Now it was Kyrano’s turn to laugh.

‘Impossible. The Mechanicus never deletes anything.’

‘I do,’ said Nemonix, exhaling a whisper of binary cant, his words a threat and an explanation in one. ‘The tech-priest beside you, what is his name?’

‘He is…’

Kyrano’s words trailed off as he realised he had no memory of the tech-priest’s identity. A noospheric aura surrounded the man, but contained only the dull machine spirits of his basic augmetics.

No name or designation, no history and no remnants of the man he had once been. At a stroke, the entirety of the tech-priest’s life had been erased from every nook and cranny of the noosphere.

As far as Mechanicus was concerned, he had ceased to exist.

Kyrano forced down his anger, as he began to suspect he had many times before. For the first time in his life, Kyrano wished he had retained a measure of his biological identity.

‘Now, to business,’ said Nemonix, lacing his hands behind his back as though wiping all trace of a member of the Cult Mechanicus from existence was an everyday occurrence for him.

Kyrano had a horrid suspicion it might well be.

‘Gryphonne Four’s loss has allowed House Cadmus to slip their leash,’ said Nemonix, careful to emphasise just where his superiors believed the blame for that disaster lay. ‘Baron Roland of Raisa has selfishly taken advantage of your weakened standing within the forge-synod to reject the beneficence of the Mechanicus in favour of Terra. Your position within the synod is already greatly weakened by the loss of so vital a forge world. To let a knightly house just slip away would likely see you removed from the synod, perhaps even stripped of your title and holdings.’

‘You know a great deal,’ said Kyrano, struggling to hide his surprise.

Judging from the tone of Nemonix’s next words, he presumed he had failed utterly.

‘Don’t look so shocked, arch magos. To someone like me, your floodstream is as porous as a macrogrit sieve. You may as well have announced your intentions over an open vox-caster link.’

The dataproctor waved an admonishing finger. ‘If I were you, I’d think twice about using unratified STC fragments for neural firewalls. And I’d especially advise against using proprietary interpolation codes to fill in the gaps.’

Nemonix waved away Kyrano’s open-mouthed shock.

‘No matter, but to return to the matter at hand, in and of itself, House Cadmus severing its ties with Mars is irrelevant. It is irrelevant, but also inevitable that other houses will hear of it. And if House Cadmus is able to cast off the Mechanicus with impunity, others may follow their example. Then where will it end? This poor ravaged house could be the domino that tips other Knight houses allied to the Mechanicus into thinking they can survive without the patronage of Mars.’

‘Then you understand what I require of you?’ said Kyrano.

‘To show Baron Roland the error of his ways and bring House Cadmus back under Martian control.’

‘Just so,’ said Kyrano.

‘And if that should prove impossible? How far are you willing to take this?’

Kyrano straightened and said, ‘If Roland will not submit to Mars, you are to ensure that House Cadmus serves as an example to the other Knight houses of how bloodily catastrophic taking a similar course of action would be.’

The dataproctor nodded, and just for a second his hazed outline became clear as he exloaded a string of impossibly subtle cant. A wash of static cascaded through Kyrano’s ocular implants.

He blinked it away and looked around the empty data vault.

A tech-priest he didn’t know and six lexmechanics stood with him in the midst of banks of whirring archive towers. Glowing status screens crackled with ripples of distortion, telling Kyrano that every single archive was completely empty of data.

‘The data transfer is complete,’ Kyrano told the nameless tech-priest, wondering why he was using his flesh-voice instead of binaric cant.

He looked around the deserted archive space one last time, but they were alone. No sign of a representative from the dataproctors. Kyrano shook his head, irritated at having been forced to waste his valuable time for nothing.

Angry at such a gross breach of protocol, Arch Magos Kyrano turned on his heel and left the empty vault.

VONDRAK

First to emerge from the Cadmus translifters was a tall, slender woman with strong features and auburn hair bound up in an elaborate headpiece of gold, silver and dripping mother-of-pearl. Clad in a long, green dress with a gold pelisse over one shoulder, Lady Cordelia of House Cadmus stepped onto the vapour-wreathed platform and marched towards the official-looking men assembled on an elevated reviewing stand.

‘They look surprised,’ she said into the sub-vocal vox-bead disguised as a ruby choker at her throat.

‘These are Vondrak Prime’s senior military commanders,’ answered Roland in her ear. ‘They were likely expecting a Knight.’

‘I hope I shan’t prove a disappointment,’ said Cordelia, marching towards the reviewing stand with a stride as sure as any colonel of the Guard.

‘Never that,’ chuckled Roland. ‘Right, what do we have?’

Cordelia’s right eye was a subtle ocular implant that relayed what she saw back to Roland’s Knight armour.

‘Our old friend, Arch Magos Kyrano,’ said Cordelia.

‘Makes sense. The petition requesting our assistance came from him,’ said Roland. ‘He’ll be anxious to remind us how much we need the help of Mars. Who else?’

Cordelia inclined her head towards a beautifully handsome man with caramel-coloured skin and a mane of glossy dark hair bound in a long scalp-lock. Encased in silver lamellar plate and a long cloak of scarlet, his exposed shoulder bore two crossed duelling blades and his lapels a crown between two star-shaped roundels.

‘Harun Rukanah,’ said Cordelia. ‘Colonel of the Mubarizan Sipahi. Service record inloading now. Looks solid. More good decisions than bad. I think we can count on him.’

A short, compact man with sallow skin and a shorn scalp stood awkwardly beside the Mubarizan colonel. He wore faded khakis with a split-winged insignia on the left breast, one wing white and one crimson. Beneath the khakis, Cordelia saw a well-worn bodyglove.

‘We don’t have a visual of him, but I’m betting that’s Aktis Bardolf of House Hawkshroud.’

‘Looks like a Knight pilot, right enough,’ said Roland. ‘And the Space Marine?’

Cordelia regarded the towering warrior in matt-black plate with a pearl-white trim and ivory eagle across his vast plastron.

‘We don’t know him,’ she said, ‘but he’s from the Sable Swords Chapter. From the iconography and embellishments to his armour, I’d say a captain.’

Lady Cordelia approached the reviewing stand and gave a short bow to the men assembled above her. She made no attempt to climb the steps at the stand and gave them just enough time to realise that they were to come to her.

Followed by their escorting soldiers, they formed up in front of Cordelia like junior officers approaching a lord general. Before any of them could speak, Cordelia held up her right hand.

Baron Roland marched from the darkened interior of the first translifter’s hold. The platform shook with the booming footfalls of the ten-metre giant. Malcolm marched at his side, and Roderick and Anthonis took longer steps to take position on either flank.

A host of mechanised giants marched onto the platform, the sunlight gleaming from the jade and topaz plates of their vast battle armour. Vasey and Garratt came next, together with the younger Knights they had trained.

The consorts of the Knights came next, each of the Cadmus women in their brightest finery and most prized jewellery. The consorts of House Cadmus never bore arms, but without their strength, the Knights could not function. They too bore items of value: folded flags, honour trophies and rolls of honour their husbands had won.

Cassia’s nose was in a book as usual, Aikaterina had her newborn son held tight to her breast, while Aeliana played a Raisan war song on a steel-framed viola that was amplified through Roderick’s hunting horn.

A phalanx of Assembler Thexton’s Sacristans flowed onto the platform after them, red-robed and proudly bearing icons of the Cult Mechanicus. Heavy gonfalons of Cadmus unfurled from long banner poles carried by bulk servitors. Cordelia didn’t miss the irritation in Arch Magos Kyrano’s body language at the sight of the Imperial aquila where once the Cog of the Mechanicus had sat.

The Knights marched across the platform in perfect lockstep, and Cordelia saw her suspicion that the sallow-skinned man was a Knight confirmed in his obvious appreciation of their power.

Cordelia smiled as she saw the momentary alarm in the faces of the gathered officials as it looked as though the striding Knights were going to roll right over them.

At the last possible moment, the Knights slammed to a halt.

Roland’s Knight took a step forward as the Knights behind him held their reaper blades high in salute. Hunting horns skirled, repeating the triple blast that sounded the charge.

The horns fell silent.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Cordelia, in flawless High Gothic, ‘House Cadmus brings its swords to defend Vondrak.’

When a Knight wears his armour, he is at one with the world and a brother to all warriors. He judges no man except by his deeds and fights with honour as his watchword. Out of his armour, every consort will agree that their husbands are easily irritated and foul-tempered.

So being stuck in the heart of a forge-temple with a host of the Martian priesthood that once considered themselves our masters is wearing at every Knight’s reserve of patience like a sculptor’s rasp.

The insect-buzz drone of binary from drifting servo-skulls and the acrid smoke from the censers the silent priests bear only serves to heighten the tension. Anthonis swats at a skull that drifts too close. It darts out of reach with blurt of hurt binaric ire.

Arch Magos Kyrano looks up at me. ‘Confirmation: you have reviewed the tactical inloads pertaining to this mission?’

The steel half-mask of his face is underlit by the glow from the hololithic table around which we are gathered. The impression is undeniably sinister. I wonder if he realises how he appears to ordinary men, or if he even cares. The Mechanicus are a breed apart, distant from the concerns of a flesh they no longer remember.

I move around the rotating holographic orb representing the contested battlefronts spread across the surface of Vondrak. The image is too zoomed out to be of any use, so I push the tech-priest manning the controls out of my way.

‘What are you doing, Baron Roland?’ says Kyrano. ‘You are not Cult Mechanicus certified.’

‘True, but I’m not an idiot and I’ve sat around enough of these damn things to know how they work. Yes, we have read the inloads, but when a man is asking me to risk the lives of my Knights, I need him to say it to my face.’

I lean forward and manipulate the various levers, dials and resistance meters of the table, ignoring the burble of outraged binary that fills the chamber from the observing tech-priests.

The image on the hololith descends through various strategic layers until finally the image of a semi-ruined city swims into focus.

‘Tell me about Vikara,’ I say.

Kyrano sweeps his hands through the spectral city and haptic implants cause a host of information tags to appear throughout the rotating image.

‘Vikara fell to the xenos three months ago and is now largely in ruins,’ says Kyrano. ‘The minoris omniphagea swarms have yet to turn its way, and the bulk of its infrastructure is still intact.’

The gently rippling image of what was once an Imperial city confirms this, but the biological encroachments of xeno-organisms are all too obvious. Noxious stranglevines split plascrete columns and slabs, spore chimneys rip through the bedrock to spew corrosive clouds into the air and acid blooms stain every wall.

Within a month at best, Vikara will cease to exist.

‘It is a distribution hub,’ continues Kyrano. ‘A transit station for munitions and war-materiel bound for neighbouring sector war efforts directed against Hive Fleet Leviathan.’

‘Was,’ puts in Malcolm. ‘It was a distribution hub.’

‘Vikara may yet be reclaimed.’

Malcolm shakes his head. ‘Not a chance. It’s an organic hellhole now. The only way you’ll get it back is if you travel arse about face through the warp and reach here a year ago.’

I hide a smile as Kyrano struggles to maintain equilibrium. It is a curious thing that the emotion tech-priests find hardest to cast off is anger. Perhaps they are more human than we give them credit for.

‘The nature of Vikara’s purpose has only superficial bearing on the proposed mission,’ I say. ‘Where is the forge-temple?’

Kyrano forces his gaze from an unrepentant Malcolm and sweeps his hands through the city, bringing up a golden cog icon over a building that, miraculously, appears to be free of any obvious biomorphic infestation.

‘Your objective lies here in the eastern district. A forge-temple of minor importance in all respects but one. Sealed in the temple’s data vaults are the last remaining memory engrams of one of the Binary Apostles.’

Reverent cant gusts from the tech-priests. More than one makes the symbol of the Cog Mechanicus across his chest. Kyrano waits, as though expecting a similar response from us.

When none comes, he says, ‘Informational: the Binary Apostles were the original techno-savants who departed Old Earth for the Red Planet, the founders of the Mechanicus. Mythical figures, no one truly knows who they were or how they achieved their miracles. Some say they dreamed them as they slept in the caves beneath Olympus Mons, others that they were drawn to a great chasm by–’

‘We don’t give a ship rat’s fart who they were,’ snaps Malcolm, always the most bluntly forthright of my Knights. It is not his place to speak like this, but Malcolm has always strained the limits of rank. Now more than ever.

I let it go, because he will say what I should not.

‘Do you think we don’t see what this is?’ says Malcolm, jabbing an accusing finger at Kyrano.

‘It is exactly what it appears to be, Sir Malcolm – a rescue mission.’

‘It’s a bloody suicide mission,’ barks Malcolm. ‘For some dusty piece of scrap metal! And the temple’s probably a digestion pool by now. It’s madness, Roland, pure bloody madness. The Mechanicus would rather see Cadmus destroyed than forsake the Cog.’

Roderick nods in agreement, while Anthonis and William pointedly study the scrolling mission parameters on the hololith. Garratt and Vasey are keen to ride, but they are young and have yet to face the tyranid swarms.

If they had, I doubt they would be so eager.

‘It will be highly dangerous,’ agrees Kyrano. ‘But I can say with a high degree of certainty that the temple remains intact.’

‘How?’ I ask.

‘Because nothing, human or xenos, has gone in or out of the temple since the city fell.’

‘It’s shielded?’

‘Yes, by a form of energy barrier we have never seen before. This particular Apostle’s area of specialisation was said to be in shield technologies – early voids, the ion technology of your Knights, Geller fields, refractors, brane displacers and the like. It has long been rumoured that his or her spirit still resides in the temple’s Manifold as a data ghost. It is my belief that some immutable nature of the Apostle’s essence is keeping the temple safe.’

‘The Apostle is still alive?’ I ask, understanding something of how such a thing might be possible.

‘I believe so, though not as you or I might understand it. Nothing so coherent as to be considered conscious, perhaps, but a binaric meme endlessly circling within a Manifold engine that came from Mars itself. Too precious to be allowed to fade, too degraded to be anything other than insane.’

‘And this is what you want us to risk our lives to save?’

‘Yes.’

I rise from the control panel and straighten my uniform jacket as I return to my Knights. ‘So, just to be clear, you want us to ride to Vikara, a city already fallen to the swarms. Then you want us to find a forge-temple haunted by the ghost of an insane Apostle. Assuming we can get in, you want us to somehow return the temple’s Manifold engine to Vondrak Prime? Is that a fair assessment?’

Kyrano nods, either not hearing my caustic tone or choosing to ignore it.

‘Knights offer the most statistically significant odds of success from all the forces at my disposal.’

I hold a hand up before Malcolm snaps at that choice bait.

‘We are not at your disposal, arch magos,’ I say, tapping a finger against Kyrano’s chest. ‘I did not bring Cadmus to Vondrak to yoke ourselves to the whims of the Martian priesthood once again.’

Kyrano meets my gaze, ocular implants to human eyes.

‘Then why did you come?’ he asks. ‘The war-summons was not specific to Cadmus, and Hawkshroud had already broadcast their intent to fight.’

‘Hawkshroud?’ scoffs Malcolm. ‘Those ragamuffins? They’d come running if you told them you were fighting sleep.’

‘Hawkshroud are an honourable house, Malcolm,’ I say. ‘Their esteem and willingness to fight are laudable.’

Malcolm purses his lips and nods, aware he has crossed a line. In the presence of the Mechanicus, the Knight houses must present a united front.

I return my attention to Kyrano.

‘We came to show that even though we no longer bear the Cog, we still hold the Mechanicus in high esteem. We are all servants of the Emperor, are we not?’

A beat, then, ‘Of course, Baron Roland. Then you will ride?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘House Cadmus will ride.’

WEAKNESSES

The chamber at the heart of the forge-temple was little more than a cell, but its occupant had voluntarily sealed himself away from the world. Its walls were smooth cream and fashioned from a polymer compound impermeable to vox-theft. Its walls boasted no inload or exload ports nor a single connection to the temple’s Manifold or noosphere.

Just as the early pictographers required light-tight chambers to do their work, so too did dataproctors require data-tight chambers.

This one was less secure than Nemonix would have preferred, but Vondrak was hardly a high-functioning forge world, and he had taken the liberty of scrambling nearby systems to provide a data-fog within which he could operate invisibly.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, flicking through the personnel files of House Cadmus. Image after image of Knights scrolled past, together with every aspect of their lives. Some was banal and easily accessible – service records, deployments, family histories, all easily available to someone who knew how to look – but other elements – behavioural profiles, biological samples, gene-markers – were elements few of the Knights would be aware even existed, let alone were being perused by an outsider.

‘Do you really think you’re going to find something in there?’ said a voice that was eerily familiar and yet almost unrecognisable.

‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Cadmus are no different to anyone else. The weakness is in the people.’

‘A typically Martian viewpoint,’ said the voice.

‘You’re thinking the same thing,’ replied Nemonix, as a shimmering hologram robed as a mid-ranking adept of Mars came into view. Nemonix glanced up at the hologram, which was being projected from thousands of micro-transmitters woven into the fabric of his own robes.

‘Well, of course, I am,’ said the adept. ‘I’m you. How could I think anything else?’

‘You’re not me,’ Nemonix reminded the hologram. ‘You’re a simulation of a me that no longer exists.’

The holographic Nemonix waved away the distinction. ‘Just because you’ve systematically stripped yourself of everything that made you me and turned you into you, doesn’t mean I can’t have thoughts of my own.’

Nemonix laughed. ‘Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? You are nothing more than a copy of what I used to be, and a poor one at that.’

‘Yet you keep me around,’ said the hologram. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because it gratifies me every day to see how far I have come since I made the engram transfer,’ said Nemonix.

‘That’s not it,’ said the hologram.

Nemonix turned back to the isolated data-slate with a sigh.

‘You are engineered with a self-sustaining form of anterograde amnesia, and every time I switch you on we have this same discussion,’ he said. ‘We bicker, you claim some deep insight as to why I created you and keep you around. I ignore you and we concentrate on the task at hand. So, can we take it as read that this latest discussion ended the same way and move on?’

The hologram folded its arms, and Nemonix sighed.

‘Here,’ he said, holding out the data-slate.

‘You could just upgrade my cognitive architecture to encompass noospheric functionality,’ said the hologram. ‘It would save you having to hold things out for me to read.’

‘Not a chance,’ said Nemonix. ‘You’re kept isolated for a reason. I can’t be leaving data trails behind me, and you’d leave one even a greenskin could follow.’

The hologram shrugged – as it always did – and perused the slate. Nemonix cycled through each of the Knights of Cadmus, letting the earlier incarnation of himself digest each one.

The last Knight to be displayed was Anthonis of Cadmus.

‘This one has potential,’ said Nemonix. ‘Destroying the foot of a Warlord Titan before it could crush a Cadian colonel. I think he could be our way in.’

The hologram shook his head. ‘No, this one’s too clinical, too cold. There isn’t enough humanity in him to exploit.’

‘Someone who takes on a Warlord in Knight armour has to have a planetary-sized ego,’ said Nemonix.

‘It wasn’t ego that drove him into that fight, it was necessity. Anthonis knew that without Colonel Pask the fight was lost. To him, there simply wasn’t any other choice.’

‘Then what about Roland? Usually the alpha has the biggest ego to exploit.’

‘No, if it’s Roland that brings down Cadmus, the whole house goes with him, and from what I read here, the Mechanicus want these Knights back in the fold.’

‘Then what would you suggest?’

‘I’d suggest we don’t go looking for strength to turn, but weakness to exploit,’ said the hologram. ‘Components within a machine that don’t function are replaced, but human beings are much more sentimental. They’ll put up with a broken cog in the machine, not realising that one little cog is what will bring them down.’

‘So who is the broken cog in House Cadmus?’

‘Flick back six pages.’

Nemonix did so and nodded.

‘Yes, this one,’ said the hologram, and Nemonix remembered that hunger, the thrill of the hunt that had largely been cut away with every augmentation that protected him from leaving any trace of his passing.

This was why he kept his old self around: to feel the things he could no longer experience and leech from it vicariously.

‘For the past ten years, he’s been chasing Roland’s coattails in the Cull,’ continued the hologram. ‘He’s hungry to lead, but Roland won’t let go of the reins. This one’s ripe to pluck. Give him what he wants and he’ll paint the Cog back onto every Knight’s armour himself.’

Nemonix studied Sir Malcolm’s behavioural profile and nodded in agreement. ‘How will we get to him?’

‘Through the weakness of every man of flesh and blood,’ said the hologram with a smile. ‘His woman.’

Nemonix scrolled down.

‘Her name is Cassia,’ he said.

On the eve of bloodshed, Cadmus feasted.

No matter the world, no matter the supply situation, the Knights and their consorts gathered at the hearth to revel in one another’s company with as much food and drink as could be sourced.

An old tradition, going back to before the fall of the High Lord, and which Cordelia had revived upon the ascension of Roland to command of House Cadmus.

In Golem Keep, those feasts took place in Swinford Hall, the monolithic wing of the mountain fortress raised by Roland’s distant ancestors. The feast chamber itself was a fantastical rotunda of slender steel, monolithic sculptures and stained glass that jutted from the plateau over the endless forests. No seats were permitted in the Hall, so no man or woman could garner favour by their proximity to the master of the house. The quarters Lord Ohden’s steward had assigned Cadmus were adequate, decided Cordelia, but they weren’t Swinford Hall. The warriors drank a local fermented concoction and talked too loudly as servitors seconded from the Sacristan camp by the city walls brought platter after platter of roasted meats and steaming root crops. Every Knight except Anthonis, who ate sparingly and only ever drank water, would ride out tomorrow with a sour belly and a hangover, but even that was traditional.

Tomorrow would see the majority of these men sally forth on what might be their last ride. The intent of the feast was clear: the man beside you might soon be dead, so partake of his company while you can.

Roland was holding court with Roderick and William, re-enacting the last Cull by the looks of her husband’s hand movements. Yes, that was a reaper blade cut, that a battle cannon shot, that a pounding stomp.

Sir Malcolm was included in Roland’s circle, but clearly wished he wasn’t. Cordelia made a note to remind Roland to be more gracious in victory.

She passed through the gathered Knights and their consorts with the practised ease of a ruling matriarch. Here and there she paused to congratulate a Knight on his improved kill tally in the Cull, or a consort for a flattering dress or well-chosen piece of jewellery.

The Knights offered sincere compliments as their wives passed messages only another consort would understand. None of the Knights read the subtext in the consorts’ words, but that was the way of things. The men had their wars, the women had duties that were no less important.

Satisfied all was as it should be, she made her way through the crowd to where Aeliana, Cassia and Aikaterina were seated on padded benches at the chamber’s hearth.

Cassia looked up from her book and smiled. Aeliana scribbled notations across sheets of music of her own composition, and Aikaterina rocked her baby gently in her arms.

‘He’s asleep?’ asked Cordelia, taking a seat.

Aikaterina nodded, and Cordelia saw dark smudges of tiredness under her eyes.

‘Thank the Emperor,’ said Cassia, without looking up from her book. ‘It’s next to impossible to write with him screaming all the time.’

‘He’s quite musical sometimes,’ grinned Aeliana. ‘I might use some of his tones in the crescendo.’

‘I don’t know why you bother with that journal,’ said Aeliana. ‘It’s not like you let anyone read it.’

‘It wouldn’t be a private journal if anyone else read it.’

‘What’s the point of writing it if no one gets to read it?’

Cassia shrugged. ‘It helps,’ she said at last.

‘Helps with what?’ asked Aeliana.

At first she thought Cassia wasn’t going to answer, but the younger girl finally closed her book and snapped a locking hasp in place.

Cassia looked Aeliana straight in the eye and said, ‘I write in it because when Malcolm is killed in battle, I want to be able to remember every moment we shared before he died.’

Cordelia was saddened to hear when as opposed to if, but supposed that was the fear of every woman who sent her husband or son off to war in these dark times.

‘You study maps and plans of the Knights’ missions to know what Roderick is riding into, that’s your way of coping,’ said Cassia. ‘This is mine.’

‘Then you go right ahead and fill that book with everything you can,’ said Cordelia. ‘And don’t let anyone tell you differently.’

She saw Cassia’s eyes drift over her shoulder and turned to see Sir Malcolm marching over to the hearth, his face taut with disappointment.

Cassia stood as Sir Malcolm halted and bowed respectfully to the other consorts.

‘Malcolm?’ said Cassia. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘We’re leaving,’ said Malcolm.

‘So soon?’ said Cordelia. ‘The feast’s barely begun.’

‘Right now,’ snapped Malcolm.

Cordelia stood from the bench and faced Malcolm and said, ‘Whatever has upset you, Sir Malcolm, there’s no excuse for rudeness.’

Cordelia saw Malcolm’s natural brusqueness fight against his respect for his lord’s consort. He was a handsome man, in an angular, feral way, with eyes like chips of dark flint and close-cropped salt and pepper hair.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, Lady Cordelia, but I have just been informed by your husband that I am not to ride out with the rest of the house tomorrow. Instead, I am to remain in Vondrak Prime with Sir Garratt and seven others.’

‘But why?’

‘Baron Roland feels that, with the presence of Hawkshroud’s Knights, it is unnecessary to ride out with our full complement of warriors. He feels it would be prudent to attach some of our Knights to Colonel Rukanah’s order of battle, to “defend the city and those we hold most dear to our hearts”.’

Cordelia heard the bitterness in Malcolm’s voice, wishing Roland had spoken to her about this decision before slapping Malcolm in the face.

‘My husband does you great honour, Sir Malcolm,’ she said, seeing a way to turn Roland’s misstep into a boon. ‘He trusts you to keep the dream of House Cadmus alive.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Cordelia turned to face Aikaterina and her baby boy. Cassia and her book of memories. Aeliana and her fresh concertos.

‘I know how dangerous this mission is,’ said Cordelia. ‘I know there are Knights in this hall who will not come back to us. Maybe none of them. Maybe I will be a widow. Maybe Aikaterina’s son will grow up without a father’s guidance. My husband understands that he may never return, and the only way he can shoulder that burden is if he leaves his very best Knight to watch over us.’

‘Vondrak Prime is well defended,’ said Malcolm, but Cordelia saw the uncertainty in his eyes. ‘There are thousands of soldiers here who–’

‘Would you trust anyone but one of our own to protect us? To protect Cassia?’ interrupted Cordelia. ‘It is the women of Cadmus that keep this house strong, who birth and raise its heirs, who bind the noble lines together. It is our strength that allows the house to endure when you menfolk ride to war. When you come back to us broken from too long a connection with your armour, who do you think puts you back together?’

Sir Malcolm knew he was beaten, but took his defeat with good grace, something he would never do on the field of battle.

‘You are, of course, correct, my lady,’ he said, his normally brusque demeanour actually cracking into a smile.

‘You would have made a formidable Knight had you been born a man,’ he said, before turning and rejoining his brother Knights.

‘He says that like it’s a compliment,’ said Aeliana as soon as Malcolm was out of earshot. ‘Didn’t he hear anything you said?’

‘He’s a Cadmus male,’ said Cordelia, sitting back down. ‘When do they ever pay attention to the words of women wiser than them?’

The consorts smiled at the oft-repeated mantra. The baby at Aikaterina’s shoulder wriggled and began to cry, loud and strident, like the hunting horn of a Knight. Aikaterina opened the top of her dress and attempted to suckle the child, but he refused to latch on to his mother’s breast.

‘The little prince still wary of the teat?’ said Cordelia.

‘The Maia Sisterhood scold me and tell me I’m a bad mother,’ replied Aikaterina, close to tears. ‘The texts Maia Agnodice gave me say he should be drinking more and sleeping longer.’

‘This from a woman who’s never borne a child,’ said Cordelia, shaking her head and taking a seat next to Aikaterina. ‘I think she forgets that babies don’t read her texts. Here, let me hold him.’

Aikaterina gratefully handed her son to Cordelia, and she cooed softly to the infant. The moment she looked into the child’s eyes, she knew what was wrong.

‘It’s just a little translation sickness,’ she said. ‘It’ll pass in a day or so.’

‘You’re sure?’

Cordelia nodded, gently running a fingertip down the child’s forehead and nose. His eyes followed her finger, taking longer each time to reopen. ‘It’s hard enough for us to travel to another world through the immaterium – how terrifying must it be for a child? Braxton suffered terribly from it.’

The child’s cries began to subside, and Aikaterina smiled gratefully to her.

‘That settles it, you’re staying with us,’ said Aikaterina. ‘He won’t stop crying for me, no matter what I do.’

‘He’s a Cadmus male,’ repeated Cordelia. ‘Since when do they ever pay attention to the words of women wiser than them?’

They laughed, but each of them knew the truth of it.

Their husbands were great men, warriors of honour, courage and nobility, but they were incomplete. They fooled themselves into thinking they were only whole when joined with their Knights, but that was a lie. A lie that had been told too often to be contradicted and repeated so often it had achieved a form of truth.

A necessary lie, but a lie nonetheless.

Roland was drunk. Not so drunk that Cordelia’s words wouldn’t register, but enough to make it an effort to keep him focused on what she needed him to hear. The feast had finally wound down as the prayer bells for Nocturns echoed from the Mubarizan billets beyond the palace.

As usual, Anthonis was the first Knight to withdraw. Since the death of Persis, he had distanced himself from his brothers. Thus far Cordelia had managed to deflect Roland’s demands that she find Anthonis a new consort. As though that would suddenly catapult him from mourning.

The rest of the Knights followed soon after, led to their chambers by their consorts, who all gave Cordelia knowing glances that told her every one of them would be standing proud on the muster fields at roll call in the morning.

As master of the house, Roland was duty bound to be the last to leave, but by that point Cordelia had ordered the servitors to water his drink so much that she doubted there was even one part per hundred of alcohol in his last five flagons.

Cordelia reclined in an iron-framed bed as Roland stumbled around the room, removing his boots with all the grace of a wounded grox. At last he managed to pull them off and slumped into the bed. He let loose a colossal fart and looked over at her as though expecting a round of applause. After an evening of beer, meat and vegetables, the aroma was only slightly less appalling than the corpses dragged up from the forest after the Cull.

‘Sorry, Cor,’ he said. ‘That local stuff Ohden sent has gone right through me.’

‘You and the sheets,’ said Cordelia.

‘Sorry,’ he repeated, reaching for her. ‘How about I make it up to you?’

‘Later,’ she said, lacing her fingers through his.

Roland blinked and sat up next to her. He recognised her tone and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. He reached over to pour two goblets of water from a ewer next to the bed.

‘What’s on your mind, Cor?’ he asked, handing one to her.

‘Did you ever hear the fable where a meso-scorpius asks a swamp-scutter to carry it across a river?’

‘No,’ said Roland. ‘My father wasn’t one for bedtime tales.’

‘It’s an old story, but the short version is that despite promising it wouldn’t, the scorpius stings the scutter as it swims across the river and they drown. Just before they die, the scutter asks why the scorpius stung it and killed them both. The scorpius shrugs and says that’s just its nature.’

‘Is there a point to you telling me this?’

‘Isn’t there always?’

‘Then would you mind getting to it?’ said Roland, draining his water and pouring another. ‘Hangovers and the Throne Mechanicus don’t go well together.’

‘I will,’ said Cordelia, taking a sip of water. ‘I just find that when I want a man to clearly grasp what I’m about to say, I find it’s better to start with something simple.’

‘Ha, bloody, ha. Get on with it.’

‘Coming to Vondrak was a mistake,’ said Cordelia. ‘I think the Mechanicus want House Cadmus destroyed.’

‘Destroyed? What kind of sense does that make?’

‘Clearly I should have started with a simpler fable,’ sighed Cordelia. ‘What I’m saying is that no matter how illogical it might be for the Mechanicus to send your Knights to their deaths, you have to understand that it’s not in their nature to let things go that once belonged to them. What is it they say? The Mechanicus never deletes anything? Right now, I guarantee that House Cadmus is still considered wed to Mars, and the forge-masters would rather see us all dead than have us walking around contradicting their records.’

‘Ach, you’re seeing enemies where there are none, woman,’ said Roland, settling himself down in the bed. ‘They want this Manifold with their ghost apostle back in one piece. How do they do get that if we’re all dead?’

‘You’re assuming there’s anything to find in Vikara,’ said Cordelia. ‘That this temple and the apostle even exist.’

That gave him pause.

‘You think Kyrano’s lying?’

‘It’s certainly possible.’

Roland considered her words, and closed his eyes, sending a mental command to release purgatives into his bloodstream from his boosted hepatic system. Cordelia saw the fog of whatever alcohol was left in his system dissipate almost instantaneously as clarity returned to his eyes.

‘I’ll piss a bloody waterfall come morning,’ grumbled Roland, ‘but if you’re right, Kyrano condemns Hawkshroud to death as well.’

‘I may not be right,’ said Cordelia, reaching over to tilt his face towards her. ‘But remember that the House Master needs to be both a fox to avoid the snares and a lion to scare away the wolves.’

Roland nodded in understanding, taking a long drink of water and wiping his chin with the back of his hand.

‘No, you’re almost always right in matters like these, but you’re forgetting one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That I want to go on this mission,’ said Roland. ‘I want to ride out there and kill those bastard xenos. You know how many of our warriors died on Gryphonne Four, and I will reap an ocean of alien blood for every name carved in the marble of the Vault Transcendent.’

Cordelia sat up and put aside her cup.

‘Revenge isn’t a trustworthy motive for war,’ she cautioned, already knowing her words would fall on stony ground. ‘And it’s only vengeance if who you’re killing knows why they’re dying. The tyranid swarms won’t know or care who it is that’s fighting them. You won’t make them fear you, Roland.’

‘Oh, they’ll fear me all right,’ he said. ‘By the end, they’ll know House Cadmus, I can assure you of that.’

Seeing his will was now set in stone, Cordelia changed tack and slipped her arm across his chest, stroking the moulded hardness of his pectoral muscle.

‘Then if you are intent on riding out, you’ll need to make sure that you’re in charge of the mission. You have to be the Magna Preceptor.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Another knightly house has been embroiled on Vondrak longer than us,’ said Cordelia. ‘The right of leadership falls, by strict protocols, to Aktis Bardolf of House Hawkshroud.’

‘Bloody hell,’ hissed Roland in irritation.

‘But I know how you can get him to willingly hand the role of Magna Preceptor to you.’

‘How?’

Cordelia smiled.

‘Simple really,’ she said. ‘Petition him.’

WARMAKERS

A thousands-strong crowd gathers in the evening rain to watch us ride out, and we give them a good show. Weapon arms pump skyward in salute and hunting horns blast from the carapaces of all eighteen Knights. Even Anthonis joins in the pageantry, albeit reluctantly. He has been so withdrawn after Persis died in the retreat from Gryphonne IV.

My Knight is alive beneath me, a towering giant as much a part of me as any limb of flesh and blood. When we arrived on Vondrak, the Knights who wore this armour before me were dreaming whispers pressing against the bone of my skull.

But the roars of the crowd have woken them.

Their hunger for glory and battle burns brightly.

I feel them at the edge of my perceptions, urging me to push the Lancer armour to the greater speeds of which it is capable. They are impatient to vicariously taste battle through me, but I restrain them for now.

Sitting immobile on the Throne Mechanicus, I see and feel the world through artificial means that are as real to me as any mortal sense. More so, for I can experience things in ways I cannot when divorced from the linking cables that bind me to my armour.

I turn my head as I feel the ghosts of warriors past urging me to let them see this new world for which we will fight.

Our route to the city walls does not pass through heavily industrialised areas of the city. This region of Vondrak Prime is all rain-slick glass and bronzed chrome, lit by the sodium glow of street-lamps. We pass beneath arches and wire-spun confections of brass that look like the webs of mechanical spiders.

We ride through the city in a show of Imperial strength, and I am content to do so.

Squadrons of aircraft sear contrails into the darkening sky, and barely visible flocks of avian life forms with torn-cloth wings that might just be birds, but probably aren’t, circle higher.

Soldiers and civilians line the route of our march, tens of thousands, cheering and waving aquila banners that hang limp with rainwater. Children carry burning flares and clockwork automata of Knights.

‘None in Cadmus colours,’ notes Roderick, seeing the same thing as me.

‘When we return that will change,’ I promise him.

‘Do any of them even know what we’re doing?’ asks William.

Or even bloody care?

Though Malcolm does not ride with us, I practically hear his imagined response to William. My second-in-command musters his eight Knights to the south, in the vacant forge complex of Verdus Ferrox, where space and resources have been set aside for the Cadmus Sacristans and support personnel.

Cordelia tells me that despite her words to him last night, he and the others are unhappy at their exclusion from the mission. But there is no one else whose war-skills I would trust to keep Cordelia and the other consorts safe. Seeing what the loss of Persis has done to Anthonis, I would have it no other way, Malcolm’s feelings be damned.

I say, ‘They know we are here to fight for Vondrak, and that is all they need or care to know.’

The monolithic city walls come into view, and I see the bulky forms of six Knights gathered at the zigzagged approach to the towering gatehouse. The plates of their armour gleam in the rain, reflecting the flames burning in great cog-braziers atop the gatehouse turrets. Their armour is a bold sunrise yellow that reminds me of the Imperial Fists. Yet where the Space Marines of that legendary Chapter are sparing in their honour markings, the Knights of House Hawkshroud show no such restraint.

Aside from shoulder plates bearing their heraldic crimson-winged aquila, each Knight’s armour is cluttered with all manner of markings. Campaign badges, ragged gonfalons bearing regimental crests, Chapter badges and litanies of past engagements all fight for space to be displayed. There is no order to their application, no consistency of decorative hierarchy in where the markings are painted. The effect is random and intrusive, as though the Knights had once abandoned their armour in a sump-level hab and its hive-scum inhabitants spent days defacing them.

My first impression of House Hawkshroud is not a good one.

There is no way to tell who the leader is. All are equally festooned with the insignia of other institutions, worlds and battles. Then one of the Knights steps forward, a Paladin.

I must assume this is Aktis Bardolf.

One of his arms is a reaper chainblade, as I bear when on the Cull, but which I exchange out for my relic blade when I don my Lancer armour. The other is the elongated barrel of a rapid-firing battle cannon.

An archetypal Knight chassis. Well-maintained, though judging by the number of corrosive burns I now see on their legs and weapon mounts, Bardolf and his Knights have recently seen battle.

That all these scars are upon their frontal armour improves my impression of Hawkshroud immeasurably.

My Knights slow their forward momentum and come to a halt behind me as I face the Knight Paladin. I stand tall and give a short bow to Hawkshroud’s lead Knight.

‘Do I have the honour of addressing Lord Bardolf of House Hawkshroud?’ I ask across the pict-vox. If his armour is equipped as I expect, Aktis Bardolf will be seeing a holographic bust of my head and shoulders.

My own slate jumps with static, and a face swims into focus, the sallow-skinned man Cordelia saw on the viewing platform.

‘I am Aktis Bardolf, but I’m no lord,’ says the image. ‘And I’m guessing you’re Baron Roland of House Cadmus.’

‘I am,’ I confirm, guessing that Hawkshroud are not one of those knightly houses with a tradition of long, convoluted protocols of greeting, replete with formal catechisms, that must be spoken before any war-making can begin.

‘About time you got here,’ says Bardolf with a wry tone that excuses what I might otherwise take as impertinence.

Remembering Cordelia’s advice from the night before, I muster my most formal tones and say, ‘Warriors of House Hawkshroud, I, Baron Roland of House Cadmus, formally petition your honourable house for aid in reaching Vikara to rescue the Binary Apostle of Vondrak. How say you, House Hawkshroud?’

For a moment I think he is going to laugh in my face.

‘House Hawkshroud never turns its back on a petition for aid,’ he says, holding his blade over his chest. ‘My reaper and those of my warriors are yours, Magna Preceptor.’

I am so surprised that I almost forget to accept.

Once again, I count my blessings to have so beautiful and wise a consort as Cordelia.

‘Your honour does you great credit, Sir Bardolf,’ I say.

He nods and says, ‘We should get moving, Baron Roland. The Binary Apostle isn’t going to rescue himself, is he?’

I lead the way beyond the city walls, moving swiftly through the outlying port districts surrounding Vondrak Prime. My Lancer is faster than any other Knight, and I advance at speed through the rain, every sense pushed to its limit.

The normal activity and noise of a busy port facility is utterly absent. The rig crews and bulk stevedores that once toiled to ship thousands of cargo containers off-world now break their backs in the magma-lit forges at the city’s heart.

Nothing now leaves Vondrak, and the lifter rigs sit idle with long iron arms pulled in tight to heavy, counterbalanced chassis. All the war-materiels produced in the city’s forges are now needed to save the planet itself.

The tyranid swarms have not yet reached Vondrak Prime, but that they will eventually is not in dispute. Thus far they have been contained by numerous battlefronts some sixty kilometres distant.

I feel the emptiness of the vast structures around me. Warehouses echo with the drumming of rain on their roofs. Supply depots now lie abandoned.

The tyranids do not employ overwatching orbital surveyors, but even in the gloaming, the scrapcloth-winged things overhead will see everything that leaves the city.

And what one beast knows, they all know.

A machine as large and powerful as a Knight is far from silent, even through heavy rain, so we have not left Vondrak Prime alone. At Arch Magos Kyrano’s suggestion we mask our deployment within a larger one.

A company of Sable Swords under the command of a captain named Daegan sally forth in the west, while the southern and northern gates disgorge column after column of Colonel Rukanah’s Sipahi, fast-moving formations of armour with powerful, line-breaking weaponry.

Accompanied by two cohorts of Arch Magos Kyrano’s skitarii and cumbersome war-engines despatched by the Ordo Reductor, Cadmus and Hawkshroud pass through a minor gate towards the south-east. The skitarii and war-engines make a show of taking up defensive positions among the towering structures of the port, and I lead the Knights between narrow canyons of crumbling brickwork, beneath tangles of overhanging steelwork and through billowing clouds of exhaust thermals.

We will be obscured from the air and have to hope that whatever alien sensory apparatus the flying creatures possess cannot penetrate the tangled architecture of the port.

I bring my Lancer to a halt at an open junction. Ahead is an enormous turn-plate criss-crossed by deep rail tracks. Used to rotate vast hauler-engines, its piston mechanisms vent pressurised steam.

Strobing amber lights flash in the hot, wet haze. Open-topped containers lie abandoned on the rails, partially obscured by the fog. A monstrous piece of rolling stock sits at the centre of the turn-plate: a hauler-engine. Its motor cowling is a torn mess of claw marks and bio-acid burns.

‘Now, did it take that damage in the mountains and still manage to get here in one piece, or did it bring something nasty with it?’ asks Bardolf as he appears at the opposite corner. The picter element of the vox is inactive. All I hear is his voice.

‘I am going to assume the latter,’ I say, indicating torn-open human bodies sprawled around the wreck of the hauler-engine. They have been comprehensively gutted, turned inside out, but not devoured. Each body has been taken apart and its internal organs laid around it in the manner of a Mechanicus adept trying to reverse engineer an unknown piece of archeotech.

‘What did this?’ mutters William as he too sees the carnage.

‘One of the mantis beasts,’ says Bardolf. ‘Some call it a lictor. I’ve seen this before. They board escaping vehicles without the crew knowing and leave some kind of trail in their wake for the rest of the swarm to follow. They ride with their victims until they think they’re safe and then kill them.’

‘You think it’s still here?’ I ask.

‘No, it will be long gone by now,’ he says.

I know Bardolf is probably right. I have fought lictors before and though there is likely only one beast, I know full well the carnage even a single monster can wreak. I push my auspex out to the limit of its range.

The interior of my armour suddenly feels hot and clammy. I feel the data ghosts within it press against the base of my skull, hungry to better experience what is happening.

Sweat beads my skull. The threat auspex hisses. Searching.

No signal. I cycle through variant spectra.

Residual radiation flares from empty containers, and conflicting thermals are making it next to impossible to take a reliable reading. Something registers to my right and I step to meet it.

My lance and relic blade flare with ignition and ammo hoppers shuck shells into the breech of my battle cannon.

‘Do you have it?’ snaps Bardolf, and the Hawkshroud Knights spread out, their battle cannons at the ready.

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing.’

The chains of a lifter rig sway in the rain. Rogue mechanical surge or a passing creature? I cannot say.

‘Move out,’ I order, knowing that jumping at shadows is just as dangerous to our mission as advancing heedlessly. ‘William, Roderick, move out in echelon behind me. Anthonis, with me. Sir Bardolf, have your Knights circle south around the turn-plate. The entrance to the tunnel network is on the other side.’

‘Understood,’ said Bardolf, and Hawkshroud step off.

I lead Cadmus over the turn-plate, careful not to crush any of the bodies beneath the articulated claw-feet of my armour. There is no blood around any of them. The rain could have washed it away, but I fear it is more likely that these poor souls were killed far from here and laid out for others to find. Terror is as much part of the swarm’s weaponry as teeth and claws and acid sprays.

We pass the wreckage of the hauler-engine, weapons loaded and primed. Every blip of the auspex sends a jolt along my spine, and it is an effort of will to keep from firing at every shadow.

Then we are across the turn-plate, and not a moment too soon.

‘Weather’s clearing,’ says Sir Roderick.

I look up, and see he is correct. The rain is easing and the clouds are beginning to part. Within minutes there will be no cover to keep us from sight.

‘Sir Bardolf,’ I say. ‘Time to get underground.’

I march to where a soaring rhomboidal archway plunges into a metal-framed structure from which numerous rails emerge. This leads beneath the surface of Vondrak and courses through the bedrock of the mountains. Over the thousands of kilometres of the underground line’s length, many branches split away, each working their way back to the surface and an entrance to one of the many deep-core mineholds.

Vikara is four kilometres from one such minehold.

These entrances will have been blocked with demolition charges, but not in any way we cannot break through with thermal lances and battle cannons. This entrance has purposely been left open for us, though I see looping cables linking hard-packed demo charges around the archway.

‘I thought you were joking,’ says Bardolf as his armour’s suit lights ignite. ‘And this is the only way?’

‘Yes.’

I hear his sigh over the vox. ‘Of course, you understand that the auspex readings down there are likely to be even worse than on the surface.’

‘I understand that, but it is four hundred kilometres to Vikara as the eagle flies,’ I tell him. ‘And we cannot hope to travel that far overground without detection.’

‘Then I hope you know the way.’

I call a topographical map of the underground network onto my navigational slate. Arch Magos Kyrano had had the controller of the rail network, a behemoth of a man by the name of Topham, provide us with the most up-to-date schematic of the subterranean network.

I exload the map to my Knights and those of Hawkshroud as my stablights pierce the darkness of the tunnel. Bardolf’s lights join those of my Knights.

None illuminate more than fifty metres.

‘Gregor, Martyn,’ I say, ‘take position within the archway and ensure that nothing follows us in.’

‘And that nothing comes out but us,’ adds Bardolf.

‘Blow these charges if it looks like a full assault coming through this tunnel,’ I tell Sir Gregor. ‘Whether we are still beneath or not. Understood?’

Both Knights signal their understanding, and I step towards the tunnel entrance. Aktis Bardolf accompanies me.

‘You’ve seen the update stamp on this, I take it?’ he asks.

I have been waiting for this.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Seventy-four years ago.’

‘So what’s down there now might bear no relation to this map of yours.’

‘That is true,’ I say, ‘but the Emperor will protect and watch over us in the darkness.’

I ride into the inky blackness of the tunnel before Bardolf or any of my Knights can gainsay me.

XENOSIGN

The pen scratched across the surface of the paper with quick, urgent strokes. Cassia could always tell which pages she’d written when Malcolm was at war. Even though he was still within the walls of Vondrak Prime – a snub to her husband if ever there was one – he was still joined with his armour.

The pages of this particular book were fresh and new, a recent purchase from the local commercia. Cassia hadn’t ventured out herself; she’d despatched one of the child servants assigned to Cadmus to find her a blank book. It had taken the vacant-eyed simpleton nearly a day to return, but it had been worth the wait.

Cassia enjoyed the different smells of each world’s paper, the subtle scents pressed into each one as she set down the day’s events, conversations and thoughts.

Raisa’s paper smelled earthy and smoky, like it had been stored in a damp cellar for years. Gryphonne IV’s paper was glossy and tear-resistant. It left a greasy, chemical residue on her fingertips as she turned each page. Vondrak’s paper had a pleasingly crude, grainy texture and smelled of ash and woodsmoke. Cassia would send the boy out again tomorrow for another, assuming he could remember which shopkeeper had sold him the book.

Cassia looked up from her book as a cold draught sighed down the empty corridor. She sat in a wide window alcove in the upper reaches of Lord Ohden’s keep. She’d needed some solitude to gather her thoughts, but solitude was in short supply in the consorts’ quarters.

Aikaterina’s brat was playing up again, and his caterwauling was uniquely capable of passing through walls of solid stone and doors of reinforced steel. She’d left without an escort to explore the keep and find some peace and quiet to write in her journal.

William and Aikaterina had grand visions of their son becoming a Knight of Cadmus, but Cassia had her doubts. Unless he toughened up, and fast, the child would never survive the Rite of Becoming. What a young man felt as he sat in the Throne Mechanicus would always be part of him, and that child was frightened of his own shadow.

Cassia’s quill flicked across the page. She and Malcolm had not yet been gifted with a child, but that day would come soon enough. Malcolm’s seed was strong, and Cassia’s lineage filled with wide-hipped women who’d borne many strong sons and sturdy daughters. When she decided it was time for Malcolm to provide her with a child, Cassia wouldn’t let a screaming infant shame her with its crying.

She paused in her writing to look down through the coloured glass of the window at the city below. Vondrak Prime was girding its loins for battle. Aeliana said she’d overheard the Sacristans say that the xenoswarms had broken through the southern front and were advancing on the city.

Even if that were true, it gave Cassia no cause for concern.

She’d read the informationals. Hive Fleet Hydra was a minor swarm, not even close to the strength of Leviathan. She’d seen battlefields and the preparations for war a hundred times. This one was no different to any other, and one lost battlefront was no reason to panic.

Cassia looked away from the scenes of war preparation and gasped in surprise.

She was no longer alone.

A black-robed adept stood with his hands laced before him and his hood drawn up over his head. The soft glow of augmetics and the gleam of nearby lumens on a ceramic faceplate were the only hints of what lay beneath the hood.

‘Apologies, Lady Cassia,’ said the adept. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘Then you shouldn’t damn well sneak up on me like some kind of bloody assassin,’ snapped Cassia, shutting her book and smoothing down her dress. She searched his robes for some identifying signifier, a stitched rune or Cog or aquila, but there was nothing.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘And how do you know my name?’

‘My name is Adept Nemonix,’ said the adept. ‘And I make it my business to know a great many things.’

‘Are you Mechanicus?’

‘I serve the will of the Omnissiah, yes,’ he said. ‘Though not in a capacity with which you would be familiar.’

‘That’s no kind of answer.’

‘May I sit?’ asked Nemonix, then did so before she could say otherwise. Even the light coming through the window seemed reluctant to venture beneath his hood. She saw the dim outline of a porcelain mask with a single glowing orb at its centre and three vertical slits where she would expect to find his mouth.

Despite his inhuman appearance, his manner was curiously human and the voice entirely organic. Cassia was instantly suspicious.

‘What do you want, Adept Nemonix?’

‘Is that an actual book you’re reading?’ he asked, ignoring her question.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know how rare it is for people to actually read a book made of paper these days? Fewer than one in thirty thousand ever bother to read anything that isn’t on a slate or a devotional pamphlet. I find that immeasurably sad. It’s just not the same without the smell of a new book’s pages or the texture of its paper under your fingertips.’

Cassia smiled in agreement and glanced down at Nemonix’s hands. They were utterly smooth, like those of a dressmaker’s mannequin. She couldn’t picture him with a book.

‘We agree on that, at least,’ said Cassia.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, what are you reading?’

‘The Spheres of Longing,’ said Cassia, the first book that leapt to mind when she pictured Malcolm’s bookshelves. The idea of telling this adept of her journal seemed wrong on a fundamental level.

‘Ah, the esoteric philosophy of Gideon Ravenor,’ said Nemonix. ‘“Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete. A true man may flinch away its embrace, if he is stalwart, and he girds his soul with the armour of contempt.”’

‘I take it you’ve read it.’

‘Of course,’ said Nemonix. ‘It’s required reading for someone in my profession. I have other examples of his work if you find his writings to your taste. Personally, I find Ravenor to be a touch overearnest. His former master, however, now there’s a man who knows how to pen a lurid tale or two.’

‘What is it you want, Adept Nemonix?’

He nodded and said, ‘Direct. I admire that.’

‘Then please extend me the same courtesy.’

‘Of course,’ said Nemonix. ‘Your husband, Sir Malcolm.’

‘What about him?’

‘He is a brave warrior, a natural leader. He would make a fine master of House Cadmus should Baron Roland ever decide to set down his relic blade.’

Cassia’s lip curled in a sneer.

‘You’ll have to prise it from his cold, dead fingers,’ said Cassia. ‘Roland isn’t about to hand over power, even to someone who deserves it. Did you know Malcolm was only three kills behind Roland this time?’

‘I did,’ said Nemonix. ‘I have studied the pict captures and bio-readers from this year’s Cull. And if I were being unkind, I might say that Roland has a distinct advantage in the Cull.’

‘What advantage?’

‘His Lancer armour.’

Cassia sighed, almost disappointed. ‘No, he doesn’t wear his Lancer armour during the Cull. He says it would give him an edge over the others.’

‘Indeed he doesn’t wear his Lancer armour during the Cull, but bonding with such a finely crafted piece of technology over a length of time changes the way a warrior’s mind processes inputs. Yes, Roland wears ordinary Errant armour on the Cull, but his mind and his link to his armour are far above that which any other Knight experiences.’

Cassia didn’t know if that were true, but it sounded plausible. How else could Roland have clung on to his position as Master of Cadmus for so long?

‘Do you think Roland is aware of that?’

Nemonix sat up straighter, as though backing away from such an implication. Every aspect of the adept’s body language conveyed a deep and genuine regret at being the bearer of this information.

‘I’m sure Roland doesn’t even know how evolved his cognitive link with his armour has become,’ he said. ‘Just as I have no doubt the good baron believes his continued success to be a result of superior skills. But…’

The unspoken accusation hung in the air between them.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Cassia.

Nemonix hesitated before answering, as though unsure whether or not he was treading on dangerous ground. At last he appeared to reach a decision within himself.

‘Roland rides in search of a relic incalculably valuable to the Mechanicus, but he leaves his best Knight behind? Forgive me if I overstep my boundaries, Lady Cassia, but that does not sound like the decision of a competent leader. More like a petulant child who does not want his closest rival anywhere near his glory.’

Cassia nodded in agreement and said, ‘What are you suggesting?’

Nemonix leaned forward, as though afraid their conversation might be overheard, though they were completely alone.

‘I can help Malcolm,’ he said. ‘I can help him win the next Cull and give Cadmus the leader it deserves. I can arrange for his Knight to be upgraded with Mechanicus technologies without anyone knowing. Enhanced target acquisition protocols, weapon modifications and the like.’

‘Won’t the Sacristans know about something like that?’

Nemonix shook his head and even though his face was obscured, she sensed his amusement. ‘Sacristans, please. Who do you think trains them? They provide rote maintenance, following basic rituals of consecration, nothing more. None would even know what they were looking at, let alone its purpose.’

‘And you can arrange this now?’ asked Cassia, picturing Malcolm riding at the head of the Knights of Cadmus from the vaults beneath Golem Keep.

‘I can indeed,’ said Nemonix.

Verdus Ferrox was a collection of rusted and partially abandoned manufactoria on the southern edge of Vondrak Prime. Most of its functional machinery had been stripped out and moved to working forges, but here and there a hulking, cylindrical furnace or milling machine still thrummed with latent power in a hollowed out structure.

Machines that no longer functioned, but which the Mechanicus no longer knew how to deactivate, burped streams of noxious fumes from louvred vents.

Numerous ore viaducts and waste chutes arched overhead, some running to barred culverts in the wall, others to shuttered evacuation chambers below ground. Most were empty. Some still drizzled toxic byproducts of failed industry in a corrosive smirr. Grainy particulates hung in the air like mist.

It was, Malcolm considered, a run-down crap-sink of a place, and Assembler Thexton’s Sacristans were taking their sweet time in making it battle-ready. It was, Thexton claimed, too neglected, too damaged and too disconnected to be easily restored.

‘It’s a glacier of crap,’ agreed Malcolm. ‘So I need you at it with a thermal lance or I’ll shove mine so far up your exload port you’ll be breathing fire until the end of time.’

That got Thexton and his men moving.

He stalked the crowded forge complex, circumventing monolithic stacks of flaking rebar cages and dunes of fossil fuels piled higher than his armour. He bellowed orders to the thousand or so Sacristans through his hunting horn.

Ammo stockpiles too close to fuel reserves? Move them. Rally points not far enough away from potential chokeways? Resite them. Servitors and indentured workers not moving fast enough? Motivate them with extreme prejudice.

Last night’s conversation with Cassia had unsettled him greatly, and he was taking out his indignation on the poor lot in his way.

Shouting and intimidation wasn’t the subtlest form of leadership, but it was getting results. Verdus Ferrox was starting to look like it might actually be able to service a knightly house at war.

Sir Garratt and the rest of the Cadmus Knights prowled the perimeter beneath the city walls. Malcolm knew his own reputation was fearsome, but young Jaime Garratt was something else entirely. A feral wildcat of a man who styled himself as a champion of the underdog.

Probably because he came from one of the lesser noble families of Raisa and he’d fought tooth and nail to win acceptance into the Knighthold of Golem Keep; Malcolm liked him, but knew better than to turn his back on him.

‘How goes it, Garratt?’ said Malcolm. ‘This place looks like it might not actually leak like a martyr on his way to meet the Emperor.’

Sir Garratt paused, and even through the crackle of the vox and the anonymity afforded by the carapace, Malcolm felt the younger man’s bitterness at being left in Vondrak Prime. The other Knights continued their circuit of the forge complex.

‘Ah, who the hell cares, anyway?’ snapped Garratt. ‘It’s not us that’ll be defending this place, is it? Bloody skitarii and Guard’ll be taking the brunt of any fighting.’

‘True enough,’ agreed Malcolm, turning towards the open gates of the forge complex behind him. ‘That’s if they ever decide to damn well turn up.’

‘Better be soon, I hear the southern front’s folded like a Raisan mutant with a reaper in its gut.’

‘So they tell me,’ said Malcolm. ‘And when the little people turn and run, who’s going to stop the beasts getting in?’

‘Cadmus all the way,’ said Garratt, punching out his reaper blade and revving its bladed teeth.

‘Cadmus all the way,’ repeated Malcolm, stepping in and slamming the flat of his own blade against Garratt’s. Nearby Sacristans jumped at the clash of the heavy reapers and backed away, fearing they were about to be caught up in an honour duel. A binaric admonition appeared on Malcolm’s slate from Thexton. He ignored it.

A flash of movement on one of the ore viaducts caught Malcolm’s eye. He glanced up. Something was up there. A flash of light on something wet. Smooth and glossy looking.

‘Jaime,’ he barked. ‘Get to the gates and shut them. Now.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Just bloody do it.’

Garratt heard the seriousness of Malcolm’s tone and his Knight turned to stride through a swathe of scattering Sacristans without another word. His horn blared the rising note of the Call to Arms. Answering brays echoed from all around Verdus Ferrox.

Malcolm dropped the threat auspex over his senses and felt the heat of aggression flood his limbs. Chem-shunts activated dopamine channels within his augmented brain to boost cognition speeds.

‘What in name of Roland’s balls is going on here?’

His awareness of his surroundings became sharper, more encompassing. He saw everything around him. Structures greyed out, while Sacristans and servitors became textured colours, outlined in blue.

Flaring blooms of red appeared on his surveyors. Above, behind, and to the side. Mostly above. Malcolm pushed his Knight out, rolling his shoulders and activating his battle cannon with a thought.

A targeting reticule appeared before him. He centred it on the main arch of the ore viaduct.

‘Not on my watch, you little–’

The battle cannon thundered. Once, twice.

The arch exploded, torn apart by twin high-explosive shells. Smoking debris tumbled to the ground in an avalanche of shattered masonry and steel and dust. Amid the debris slamming down were bodies.

Xenos bodies.

They spilled from the ruined stubs of the viaduct in an endless tide. Hundreds of broken alien forms with elongated skulls, hunched over and oddly angled. Hook-bladed limbs thrashed the air as they fell.

Scores were dead, but hundreds more were still alive.

‘Get clear!’ yelled Malcolm as the heavy stubbers worked into his shoulder mounts raked the alien bodies falling from the swaying structure. ‘It’s coming down!’

Ironwork supports pulverised in the blast snapped like splitting timber, and the entire viaduct came down. Thousands of tonnes of steel and stone dropped with a deafening crash of tearing metal and alien howls.

Culverts in the walls exploded with screeching monsters, spindle-limbed things with swords for arms and fang-filled chasms for mouths.

‘Knights of Cadmus!’ yelled Malcolm. ‘Gaunts in the wire!’

Death chokes the darkness. All manner of groundcars, cargo haulers, bikes, mineworking machinery, agricultural vehicles, fuel tankers and ore-carriers pack the tunnel. I am isolated from the smell of rotting, burned flesh, but I imagine it to be horrendous.

Scorched bodies sit within burned out skeletons of groundcars, as though their drivers and passengers still wait patiently for rescue. Others sprawl over the rails or slump hopelessly against the melta-smoothed walls. I see fire damage everywhere. Hardly surprising given the flammable, ore-rich material that usually transits these tunnels.

A rock fall had blocked the tunnel, less than a kilometre from the black maw through which we descended into this lightless hell. Our battle cannons punched through it with ease, but these people had nothing. No way of reaching the transient safety on the other side of the cave-in. No way of escaping the fire that burned away their air and seared the meat from their bones.

‘Emperor have mercy upon them,’ said Anthonis, his armour’s lights sweeping over a packed cargo-8 with at least thirty people lying dead around it. Mostly women and children.

‘I’d say He’s all out of mercy for these poor souls,’ says Aktis Bardolf.

‘Have some damned respect,’ says William.

The sight of so many dead youngsters is unsettling for us all, but especially for William. He leaves a child behind in Vondrak Prime: a hearty-lunged son, from what Cordelia tells me. It takes a special kind of man to see dead children and not fear for the lives of his own.

‘I mean no disrespect, Sir William,’ said Bardolf.

‘Then speak no ill of the dead, nor disrespect for the Emperor,’ hisses William in response.

‘I did neither,’ returns Bardolf. ‘I spoke as I saw.’

I march my Knight between William and Bardolf.

‘These people are dead, and you two arguing about it will not change that,’ I say. ‘They’re dead, and we must move on.’

Sir Roderick marches alongside me, the carapace of his armour wet with drizzled moisture. Cracks in the ceiling drip with meltwater from the mountains above, and I am suddenly cold as I think of the millions of tonnes of rock just above us.

Pools of black water reflect the swaying, sweeping stablights of our armour as we move on. I pick a path through the debris of fleeing people and blackened vehicles, moving through gaps where I can, working with Roderick to create them where there are none.

It is slow going, and as the days pass our threat surveyors find it next to impossible to function. In so enclosed a space, with so much metal around, I am daily assailed by a soft burr of distortion and blips of sensor ghosts.

Our stablights bend and twist with every kilometre we travel, and the shadows they throw on the walls are those of elongated monsters. I try not to let my mind form threatening shapes where there are none, but it is a primal survival mechanism from an earlier age when we were right to fear the shadows, and cannot easily be overridden.

The map on the slate before me ripples with interference. It is an inloaded data stream and should not be affected by our depth or the metallic composition of the mountains.

Something down here is making my armour jittery.

On the third day of travel, a private link between my armour and that of Aktis Bardolf clicks with connection.

‘Are you sure we’re still on the right route?’ asks Bardolf.

‘I am sure,’ I say, though I have had to take a number of turns where I was less than entirely certain.

‘My map says differently.’

I bring my Knight to a halt and turn to face the Master of House Hawkshroud.

‘If you have something to say, then say it, Sir Bardolf.’

‘I told you, I’m no lord.’

‘But you think we are going the wrong way?’

‘Not yet, but that map of yours is hopelessly out of date, and I know you’ve had to guess a few of these tunnels,’ replies Bardolf. ‘Sooner or later you’re going pick a wrong tunnel, and that’s going to get us all killed.’

I try to control my anger, but it is difficult when the Knights before me surge through the Throne Mechanicus. They have heard what they perceive to be disrespect in Bardolf’s tone and want me to punish him.

It is only Cordelia’s appreciation for the Hawkshroud mindset that keeps irritation from clouding my judgement.

Hawkshroud are intensely loyal to those who have earned their respect, and though our reputation precedes us, Cadmus has yet to prove our worth to Bardolf in deeds.

‘I am the Magna Preceptor,’ I say, hoping his reverence for that title will end this.

‘And I respect that,’ says Bardolf. ‘But you won’t be for much longer if you get us lost down here.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘It’s a promise, because we’ll all be dead,’ he says. ‘How long do you think we’ll last if we can’t find a way out soon? Our Knights will need to refuel and charge when we get to Vikara, and I don’t fancy trying to find my way out of here on foot. Do you?’

Once more, the previous Knights of Cadmus surge with fury at his insolence, and part of me wants to join them in their outrage. I want to be angry at Bardolf. I want to dismiss his concerns.

But he is right.

I take a breath and say, ‘You are correct, Sir Bardolf. I am so intent on showing the Mechanicus how House Cadmus can operate without them, that I have been reckless with the lives of our brave Knights.’

‘Making mistakes is easy,’ says Bardolf. ‘It’s admitting to them that’s hard. Let’s not make any more.’

‘Agreed,’ I say. ‘Shall we continue?’

‘We should,’ says Bardolf, turning his Knight back the way we came. ‘And quickly. We’re being followed.’

BLOODING

The threat auspex was unable to cope with the sheer volume of targets, so Malcolm muted its screaming warnings. Targeting solutions filled his vision, but he didn’t need them.

It was impossible to miss.

His battle cannon tore teardrop-shaped craters in the concrete. Broken alien bodies and debris were flung skyward with every percussive detonation. Stubbers sawed through the swarms of gaunts. His ammo counters were depleting at a rate he’d not known since Gryphonne IV.

‘Keep them away from the gate,’ he ordered, walking backwards between a giant metal-shaping engine and the collapsed pier of the ruined viaduct. Dozens of beasts bounded towards him. Their hind legs were obscenely strong, powering them forward in a series of leaping, clawing bounds. They barged each other in their fury to reach him. He gunned them down, but at least a dozen survived to leap towards his head.

Malcolm brought his ion shield around and slammed half of them from the air. The rest met his howling chainblade and their bodies were churned to black matter.

Hundreds of fanged beasts poured from a culvert a hundred metres to Malcolm’s left. He turned and twin blasts from his battle cannon collapsed it on top of them.

Still they squirmed from the rubble.

He heard more screeching and turned, slamming his foot down on a pack of swarming raptor creatures.

The human element of Verdus Ferrox were falling beneath the claws of the xenos by the score. Half-human cyborgs and all-too-human Sacristans were being torn to shreds before they could even defend themselves.

‘Thexton! Get your people out of here right bloody now!’

Their screams of pain cut Malcolm deep. He knew all too well the horror of being a fleshy mortal on the ground when these murder-beasts were in the wind. He saw a Sacristan punctured through his chest by one gaunt and lifted for another to snap its jaws shut on his head. Bulk servitors stood mutely as they were disembowelled. Human labourers were sliced down without mercy and left to bleed out from horrifically cruel cuts.

Men and women were pounced on as they fled for the gate, scything claws stabbing them repeatedly in the back. Acid saliva burned them. Spitting darts of razor chitin sliced their legs out from under them.

The gaunts fell on them all, killing and feasting.

Malcolm’s stubber cut torn-meat lines through the tyranid assault, each solid slug bursting a gaunt apart. Their vital fluid was black and oily, not really blood at all, but some alien ichor masquerading as blood.

The call of hunting horns told him the location of the rest of his Knights.

Garratt had followed his orders and was making his way to the gate. Farrimond corralled a diminishing host with his stubbers and sweeps of his reaper. The roaring teeth of his blade threw hunks of alien flesh fifty metres through the air.

Vasey held a choke-point at a culvert whose shutter remained treacherously open. Alien creatures poured inside from beyond the walls. Malcolm didn’t know how they could possibly have found a way in.

Every entrance was supposed to have been sealed.

However this vanguard force had gotten into Verdus Ferrox, Malcolm wasn’t about to let them reach the city proper. He’d be damned if he’d allow the forward elements of the xenoswarms into Vondrak Prime through House Cadmus.

Enoch and Silus appeared at his side, weapons hot.

‘Do we ride?’ asked Enoch.

‘A hard counter to break them,’ said Silus. ‘Containment and slaughter. Just like the Cull.’

Malcolm wanted nothing more than to charge headlong into the gathering mass of alien monsters. To stomp and cut and blast them to unrecognisable meat paste.

But this wasn’t like the Cull at all.

All a Knight had to do there was kill and kill again. Now Malcolm had a duty of care to those around him.

Roland had entrusted him with a duty, the honour of which it had taken Lady Cordelia’s words to make him see. The future of House Cadmus was in Malcolm’s hands, though not as she had suggested in the form of the house consorts and its children.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Protect Thexton’s Sacristans. We lose them, we lose Cadmus. They’re our prime objective. That and making sure these damn things don’t get out of here.’

Malcolm’s enhanced situational awareness painted a vivid picture of the battle for Verdus Ferrox. He issued his orders in clipped Raisan battle-cant and the Knights spread out.

They killed the beasts attacking the Sacristans, clearing them away from their charges with accurate bursts of stubber fire and pinpoint thermal lance strikes. Some of their own were lost in the shredding barrages, but better some than all.

‘Like the First Knights, eh?’ said Vasey, stomping down on a darting pack of gaunts. ‘Shepherds keeping the livestock safe from the monsters.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Malcolm, shifting to his reserve stock of stubber shells. ‘Except I don’t plan on eating this flock.’

‘There’s a few with enough meat to spare,’ laughed Vasey as his stubbers ripped through a pack of gaunts bounding around the flanks. ‘Perhaps they could–’

He never finished his sentence.

The head-section of his Knight exploded in a roiling fireball of white-green fire.

‘Imperator!’ swore Malcolm, as arcing whips of lightning coruscated over the molten ruin of Vasey’s carapace. He saw a charred body wreathed in spectral flames fall from the Knight.

A ghost trail of shimmering fire reached back to the culvert he’d previously brought down. Enormous chunks of rubble floated impossibly in the air around it.

‘Raisa’s horns, what is that?’ said Enoch.

A bloated creature with a serpentine body folded back on itself hovered in the midst of the floating rock. Its head was an elongated hydrocephalic nightmare of rippling flesh and segmented plates. Atrophied limbs and vestigial appendages hung from a body undulant with peristaltic motion.

A shimmering haze of psychic energy hung around it. Malcolm’s gun-auspex struggled to acquire it.

‘Zoanthrope,’ spat Malcolm.

He pushed out his armour’s power systems, charging towards the suspended beast. Its head turned towards him. Fangs bared and black eyes glimmered with corposant.

‘Stay on station!’ ordered Malcolm. ‘Get the Sacristans clear.’

His battle cannon bellowed again. More bodies disintegrated and blew apart. Even those beyond the immediate blast had their internal structure pulped by the overpressure.

The zoanthrope remained unharmed, the fire and shock of the blast morphing around its body as though it existed in its own personal bubble of space. Packs of gaunts raced to meet him, praetorians to the withered beast.

His reaper blade swung and a score of beasts died. Black ichor sprayed from sundered chitinous bodies, and he revelled in their screeches of pain. Stubber fire flensed them. Bodies burst and ripped open.

Malcolm’s bulk was a weapon too. He stomped with heavy feet, crushing bodies with every step.

He was close now, almost close enough to strike.

He saw the swollen zoanthrope’s flesh pulse with its own internal illumination. That same light shone in the eyes of the gaunts snapping around him, as though it drew some vital essence out of them.

A shrieking blast of the same white-green fire that killed Vasey thrust towards Malcolm like a lance. He threw up his ion shield and felt the searing heat of impact. Malcolm convulsed on his Throne Mechanicus, his arm feeling like it was bathed in melta fire.

Emerald sparks exploded from his pict-slate and fell from the cabin roof. Though he knew his flesh arm was unhurt, the repercussions from the connection pain would be just as real.

His Knight staggered, gyros straining to keep him upright. Its stumbling steps crushed a handful of gaunts, but more were surrounding him with every passing second.

Malcolm righted the Knight and looked up into the beast’s eyes. They had dilated monstrously, and in those black, soulless orbs he saw himself die a thousand deaths, torn apart by its guardians and devoured morsel by morsel. He saw Cassia stripped to the bone by wriggling, maggot-like things with more teeth than body. He saw his children-yet-to-be cut apart by sickle-blade limbs and everything he ever cared about subsumed into a chittering hive where every screed of being was enslaved to the will of a monstrous overmind.

‘Get out of my head!’ yelled Malcolm, triggering a blast of ’slaught from his chem-dispensers. The Sacristans warned him against the use of so dangerously addictive a stimm, but right now he needed a dose of pure, unadulterated rage.

Pain bored into every neural receptor in his skull, and Malcolm screamed as it ripped through his body. It filled his veins with fire, his mind with towering fury at the very presence of this abominable creature.

It was no longer a zoanthrope, just a beast to be exterminated. It didn’t deserve the recognition of a name. Malcolm barged into the monster, slamming his head against the armoured carapace of its head. Bony plates split apart and milky efflorescent fluid gushed out.

He felt its pain course through him and revelled in it.

‘I’m going to use your skin to wipe my arse,’ he said and rammed his roaring reaper blade into its writhing underbody.

The fleshy sac of its vestigial form ruptured along its length at the tearing impact. Malcolm ripped the blade up. Soft, squirming entrails spilled out in a flood.

The zoanthrope fell from his blade in sopping chunks. Its flesh was devoid of mass, like a punctured fuel bladder. The rocks floating in the air fell to the ground, and an utterly alien death scream blew outwards like the blast wave of an artillery strike.

The swarming gaunts faltered in their attack, screeching and writhing in symbiotic pain. For an instant, Malcolm dared hope that this was the only creature directing the ravenous packs.

But moments later, the gaunts swarmed him, climbing his legs with desperate, slithering, scraping leaps, claws and fangs pulling them up his armour.

Still mad with the ’slaught, Malcolm slammed himself into the wall. Gaunts shrieked as they were crushed. His reaper tore others from his body, but not enough. He saw a trio of beasts scramble onto his head. He didn’t need auspex or surveyors to see them – they were right in front of him.

Claws slashed down the armourglass of his canopy, leaving deep scores. Fang-filled jaws worked up and down on the glass, leaving grooves of acidic saliva in their wake.

The eyes of the gaunts were empty as they savaged the glass of his armour. He saw nothing. Not hatred, not anger or any emotion he might have expected from a foe doing their damnedest to end him.

Just a blind urge to kill. Because that was what they were bred to do. Because a shoal mentality drove them into a frenzy. They weren’t creatures in their own right, just fragments in a hive, specks of dirt in a sandstorm.

They exploded all over the glass.

Malcolm felt the impact of multiple stubber rounds. Not powerful enough to harm him or penetrate his armour, but enough to register. Anger touched him at the thought he had been fired upon by his own warriors, but he instigated an emergency synaptic flush to get the ’slaught from his brain.

Garratt rode into view, his armour scarred and torn around the lower plates of his legs. Alien blood soaked him to the waist. Smoke drooled from his twin stubbers.

‘You’re clear,’ said Garratt.

‘The gate?’ said Malcolm, his mouth dry and gummy with stimm-residue and neural purgatives.

‘Sealed. The Mubarizan are there with two companies of troop carriers and super-heavies,’ said Garratt. ‘Three Baneblades and a Stormhammer. More on the way.’

‘The Sacristans?’

‘Safe,’ said Garratt. ‘Not all of them, but enough. That was a good call, Sir Malcolm.’

Malcolm nodded, knowing he was in for a hell of a rough ride when the stimm-hangover kicked in.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘They’ll call this a victory.’

Cordelia held Sir Farrimond’s hand as the medicae finished binding his chest and shoulders in a synth-skin wrap. Bio-acid had eaten through the carapace of his Knight and drooled onto Farrimond’s recumbent form.

The battle of Verdus Ferrox had been over for ten hours, but Colonel Rukanah’s flamer units were still clearing the last of the beasts from the forge complex. In saving Assembler Thexton’s Sacristans, Malcolm had saved House Cadmus, though Cordelia wondered if he truly appreciated the scale of what he’d achieved.

But it been victory won at a terrible cost.

Jon Vasey was dead, as was Axl Roddam. Farrimond and Enoch were wounded, and Malcolm’s armour was going to need extensive repairs to get it walking again.

Farrimond groaned as the last of the bandage was tied off, and Cordelia squeezed his hand. The young man had refused pain balms until Cordelia ordered him to stop being so stupid. One of the house’s newly elevated Knights, Mikel Farrimond had yet to choose a consort (and still believed it would be him that chose) and was full of that heady cocktail of idiotic youth and ego that made him think he was indestructible.

He looked so young.

His features weren’t yet drawn tight over his skull by the constant strain of being bound to a mechanised war machine that took a little of its rider each time they bonded.

Had Roland ever been that young? She supposed he had, though she could barely remember the time before he’d gone through the Ritual of Becoming. He’d been young and dashing, as they all were, but even before he’d sat on the Throne Mechanicus, there had been a refusal to compromise that had drawn Cordelia to him.

That trait had been amplified by the ritual and had only grown stronger over the years. She’d nurtured his sense of dissatisfaction with the Mechanicus, and when the priests of Mars had let slip their hold over Cadmus, it had taken only the slightest push to convince Roland to cast off the Cog.

House Cadmus was bound to the Emperor and always would be.

‘Thank you, my lady,’ said Farrimond, as the medicae departed to treat another poor unfortunate.

‘You were very brave, Sir Farrimond,’ she said, but his eyes were already slipping closed as the balms took effect. Cordelia laid his hand down beside him and rose to her feet, smoothing down her dress.

‘Very brave,’ she said again, turning and making her way down the central corridor of the medicae building. Three hundred beds of wounded lined either side of the wide chamber like pews in a templum, where those in pain came to give reverence to an ever-hungry god of suffering.

She pushed that thought aside as unworthy and dangerous.

This was but one floor among fifteen. One medicae building out of seven. The wounded from the collapsing southern front were spilling from the medicae primus to this overflow structure, and it wouldn’t take long for it to exceed its capacity.

Cordelia wasn’t the only one of the consorts who’d come to give succour to the wounded; the women of Cadmus were spread throughout the various levels of the building. Aeliana played her viola softly at the far end of the chamber, as Cassia read aloud from the book of Sebastian Thor. Aeliana’s music and Cassia’s words combined seamlessly to help alleviate the torments of those injured in the Emperor’s service.

The music came to an end as Cassia reached the conclusion of the verses spoken by Thor at the death of the insane High Lord. A few of the wounded clapped, most just smiled, even through their pain. A few called out for more, but Cordelia stopped and raised her hands.

‘Brave souls,’ she said. ‘My dear sisters need rest before returning to you. Would you have Aeliana wear her fingers to the bone or have Cassia bereft of voice? Look to your own courage and fortitude for a time and they will return to you soon, I promise.’

Cordelia’s words had the desired effect, and the wounded grit their teeth and bore their hurts stoically. To do otherwise would be to admit weakness before a lady and demand of them more than could honourably be asked. Cordelia nodded to her fellow consorts, and they passed from the main ward-chamber of the medicae building.

Once beyond its serried ranks of injured, the consorts found solitude in a small chapel space, bathed in amber light and filled with the cloying scent of long-dead flowers. A modest statue of the Emperor was placed in a softly glowing alcove, kneeling beside a wounded soldier and tending to his wounds with the power of His divine light alone.

They took it in turns to kneel and bow their heads to the Master of Mankind, before sitting on the well-worn wooden benches. Aeliana massaged stiff fingers and Cassia rubbed tired eyes.

‘A long night,’ said Aeliana.

‘You’ve done well,’ said Cordelia. ‘There’s a lot of wounded men in there who’ll survive thanks to you both.’

‘What did we do, really?’ said Cassia.

‘Don’t underestimate the power of a pretty face when it comes to wounded soldiers,’ said Cordelia. ‘You saw their faces when you stopped playing and reading. You helped, and you’re going to keep helping. Once the tyranids surround Vondrak Prime, there’s going to be a lot more wounded.’

It was a sobering thought and the three women sat in silent contemplation for a moment.

‘Someone’s going to swing for this, aren’t they?’ said Cassia.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Aeliana.

‘You should have heard Malcolm when he came back to our chambers after the battle. The language he used…’

‘Worse than normal?’ said Cordelia.

Cassia nodded slowly. ‘Much worse.’

‘Any reason in particular?’ asked Cordelia. ‘Other than the obvious, I mean.’

‘He was all set to skin Assembler Thexton alive and wear his skin as a cloak,’ said Cassia. ‘He went on at some length about all the horrible things he was going to do to him.’

‘Thexton? Why?’

‘Because the tyranids got into Verdus Ferrox somehow,’ said Cordelia. ‘And Thexton’s Sacristans were in charge of sealing off every way in.’

‘Clearly they forgot one.’

Cordelia shook her head. She’d spoken to Farrimond, and his account of how the battle unfolded didn’t match up to the notion that a single entrance to the forge complex had been overlooked or improperly sealed.

‘What is it, Cordelia?’ said Aeliana. ‘You’ve got that look in your eye that means someone’s in trouble.’

‘I know Thexton,’ she said. ‘He’s meticulous in that painful way only servants of the Machine-God can be. However many entrances to Verdus Ferrox there are, he wouldn’t have missed one.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ asked Aeliana.

‘That someone let the beasts in,’ said Cordelia.

‘Who would do such a thing?’

Cordelia sighed. She hated being right all the time.

‘Someone who stood to benefit from House Cadmus having no Sacristans left to maintain its Knights,’ she said. ‘An organisation who’d be happy to offer us freshly trained Sacristans if only we’d reaffirm our allegiance to Mars.’

‘You think the Mechanicus did this to us?’ gasped Aeliana, her cheeks ruddy with rising fury.

‘I think they’re so desperate to win us back, they’d stoop to any level to see it happen.’

Cassia brushed a strand of hair from her face. Cordelia saw the look in her eyes. At once sheepish and eager.

‘What?’ said Cordelia.

Cassia smiled. ‘A few days ago I was approached by an adept who called himself Nemonix. He told me some interesting things.’

‘Tell me everything he said,’ said Cordelia.

The side of the mountain blows out in a satisfying geyser of rubble and smoke. Daylight spears into the rail tunnel, and my auto-senses, so accustomed to the gloom, flicker momentarily as they shield my eyes from the brightness of the sun.

Aktis Bardolf took the shot, a well-placed pair of battle cannon rounds blasting a hole through the demolished railhead opening. It is not yet large enough to permit a Knight egress, but Hawkshroud’s Knights are even now tearing it wider with their reaper blades.

More light pours in, and Roderick steps to my side.

‘What do you think we’ll find outside?’ he asks.

‘With any luck, nothing,’ I say, but I am not hopeful.

Neither is Anthonis. ‘If we’ve been followed into the tunnels, the swarms will know where we are. Be ready to fight, Sir Roderick.’

‘They will know we are beneath the mountains,’ I say, ‘but there are any number of places we might emerge.’

‘And they could be waiting outside every one of them,’ says Anthonis.

‘Then you’ll get to fight sooner than you imagined,’ I say, stepping forwards. Hawkshroud has torn the hole wide enough for us to breach, three abreast. Sensible. We are likely to be returning this way at speed, probably with a host of alien killers snapping at our heels. The sooner we can get underground with our prize the better.

Aktis Bardolf waits for me at the entrance his Knights have opened in the mountainside. The rails beneath my Knight are buckled and bent upwards. I flatten them with my bulk; one less thing to trip a fast-moving Knight on the way back.

Bardolf’s grainy image on the slate grins as he says, ‘After you, Magna Preceptor.’

‘You are too kind, Sir Bardolf,’ I reply, extending my auspex through the smoke-wreathed arch. I sense nothing, but the tyranids are nothing if not masters of ambush.

‘Do you really believe we were followed?’ I ask him.

‘I know it.’

‘None of my Knights saw anything.’

‘Would you expect to see a lictor?’

‘No, I suppose not,’ I concede.

‘We could go back,’ he says, giving voice to the treasonous thoughts that have been gnawing at my nerves ever since Bardolf told me we were being followed. ‘If you think an entire army’s waiting on the other side of that opening, say the word and I’ll blow it shut again.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘We go on.’

I march my Knight forward, stepping carefully over the rubble and broken blocks of archway the battle cannon shells have brought down. I emerge into the light and move away from the opening, stretching out every sense available to me. The former riders aid me in this, sweeping my surroundings in ways I cannot even begin to imagine. Everything confirms one thing.

I am alone on the mountainside.

I signal the rest of the Knights, and they emerge in pairs, hunched as low as they can get to the ground. Shadows on the rocks tell me it is late afternoon, the sun behind the mountains and keeping this flank in shadow.

‘Vikara,’ says Bardolf, moving forward to take cover behind a sheer slab of fire-blackened gneiss. He points down the mountainside with his reaper.

At first, it is hard to make out anything amid the sprawling, overgrown forests of alien weeds choking the life from the landscape, but then I see the remains of the city.

Its walls are tumbled wreckage, and its towers of steel are wrapped in alien foliage. Giant spines of organic matter jut from the city’s plazas and thoroughfares, belching a toxic miasma into the atmosphere.

‘It is like the ruin of a city left abandoned for centuries, not one that fell only recently,’ I say.

Our Knights are still emerging from the tunnel, and I urge them to greater speed. We must be on the move. Every moment we remain static, the odds of our discovery grow exponentially.

Beyond the city, more of the spires, titanic, star-scraping things, stand stark on the horizon. The sky is a striated fog of sickly yellow and bilious green.

‘It’s like it’s being terraformed.’

‘I suppose that is exactly what is happening.’

There is movement in the city, but it is too far away to see what is making it. But one thing is certain.

‘The temple is still standing,’ I say.

Set on the side of the city closest to us is what looks like an oasis of normality. Amid the rampant xenobiology stands a single trapezoidal structure. Alone among the city’s buildings, it remains untouched by the hideous alien flora.

‘What’s that surrounding it?’ asks Bardolf. ‘Void flare?’

I am wondering the same thing. A haze of refractive energies wreathes the temple, making it seem as though I am looking through a series of continually altering lenses. I blink away the discomfort of staring too long.

‘My scanners can’t focus on the temple,’ says Bardolf, for the first time sounding unsure of himself. ‘It’s not registering on the auspex. If I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes, I’d swear on the aquila there was nothing down there but xenoforms.’

‘Kyrano told me this Binary Saint was said to have developed specialised forms of shield technology,’ I answer. ‘Perhaps this is a side effect of some kind of barrier we’ve not seen.’

The last of the Knights emerges onto the rocky flanks of the mountain.

‘Then let’s just hope there’s a way in for us,’ says Bardolf.

‘Only one way to find out,’ I say, heading down the mountain as fast as my armour will carry me.

We are a kilometre and a half from Vikara when the threat warnings light up the auspex. There is no single source; the tyranids are all around us. Flocks of avian raptors take to the air behind the city, blackening the sky with ragged wings and whipping tails.

At exactly the same moment, the dense foliage around us comes to life with organisms and flickering plant life that are native to no world of the Imperium.

I wring every scrap of power from my armour, knowing that speed is our only ally here. We can fight, but to engage any of the creatures will only slow us down. To slow is to stop, and that will see us all dead.

‘On the left,’ shouts Bardolf.

I spare a glance in that direction and see a hundreds-strong pack of leaping, bounding things. Gaunts of some variety. They are too obscured by the alien plants and we are moving too fast to properly identify them.

‘On the right too!’ warns Anthonis.

‘Stubbers only,’ I order. ‘Keep moving.’

Shoulder-mounted guns rake to the sides, keeping the beasts at bay for now. I push harder, driving my armour beyond its extreme tolerances. Assembler Thexton will have some choice words for me when he sees the state of my power core.

I switch the frequency of my vox to that of the forge-temple’s Manifold and broadcast the binaric codes given to me by Arch Magos Kyrano. He has assured me that whichever magos is in command will answer in kind.

Long seconds pass without answer, and I fear Cordelia may be proved correct in her suspicions towards the arch magos.

But then the vox bursts to life with an answering blurt of binary. I do not understand it, even connected to a living machine via my spinal plugs. But my armour understands it, and an approach vector appears on my slate.

A way in.

I crush the remains of a groundcar beneath my tread as I turn to follow the supplied course.

We reach an arterial roadway. Our pace increases.

The creatures parallel our course, each wing of pursuit slowly forcing its way closer. Others will be moving to cut off our route onwards. I shoot the closest beasts with my stubber. The dead are crushed in the stampede.

And then I am over the ruins of the city wall and striding through its streets.

Buildings ravaged by rapacious bio-organisms pass to either side of us. Corrosive rain falls as arcing spores burst on the high walls either side. I lift my ion shield to catch the worst of it. Enough to keep me alive. Not enough to keep my upper carapace from becoming pitted and grooved by acid.

We follow the approach vector, twisting through Vikara’s narrow streets. Always ahead of the swarms, but only just. They are fiendishly coordinated and we are running out of room. Fresh packs are being drawn in all around us, guided by a terrible gestalt intelligence.

Then I see the warped-lens distortion reaching out to a junction ahead. I round a corner at full stride, and the air before me ripples in waves, like heat from a metalled roadway. I see the forge-temple ahead of us, standing proud in the middle of a heptagonal plaza.

But there is something wrong with it.

It is as if the temple is nothing more than a frozen projection on a Theatrica Imperialis backcloth. An unconvincing illusion I have trouble believing actually exists. Especially as my auspex denies there is anything in front of me. All it sees is empty space, and I almost slow as I marvel at how completely we have been betrayed.

Before I do, the haze around the temple is gone. It does not fade. It does not dissipate. It simply is no more. And instead of a static image of an undamaged temple, I see a ravaged structure on the verge of collapse. Coils of energy flare from its cracked flanks and smoke billows from its numerous vent stacks. On any other day, at any other time, I would put as much distance as humanly possible between my warriors and this critical mass waiting to happen.

Standing beneath a semi-circular arch is a Knight, its armour a pale blue, chevroned with orange and jet. A banner depicting a rearing horse with a horn in the centre of its forehead streams from one shoulder.

Its reaper blade beckons us within.

I need no second invitation – packs of gaunts of all description are closing from every side. We are surrounded and there is nowhere left to run.

My vox-slate bursts to life. No picture, just audio.

The Knight’s desperate voice, pulled taut by strain and sounding impossibly distant.

‘Run!’ it pleads. ‘They can only realign the brane shield for a moment.’

We run.

SAINTS

‘You’ve been looking for me. Asking lots of questions.’

Cordelia paused by the door to the chamber she shared with Roland. The voice wasn’t one she’d heard before, but she knew to whom it belonged and managed to hide her surprise.

‘How did you get in here?’ she asked. ‘We have security measures in place.’

‘Not in any meaningful way.’

Cordelia turned to see a robed figure standing by the corner she had just turned. Black and without visible markings, only a hint of ceramic beneath his hood and the soft glow of a single ocular implant. Subtle, unlike most of his kind.

‘Adept Nemonix, I presume?’

‘Lady Cordelia,’ he said, and she didn’t miss that he hadn’t answered her question.

‘Adept Nemonix?’ she asked again, and she sensed his amusement.

‘Would it make you feel better if I said yes?’

‘It would.’

‘Then that is my current designation,’ said Nemonix, slippery as a Raisan tree-serpent.

Cordelia opened the door and beckoned him within. ‘You’ll join me? I have just sent for some hot tisane.’

‘Thank you, Lady Cordelia, I will join you, but I’m afraid I’ll have to decline the drink,’ said Nemonix.

Cordelia swept into her chambers, a modestly appointed suite of rooms with three receiving rooms, a sleeping area and an expansive dining space. She reached up and pressed a concealed stud on her bejewelled choker, activating the hidden picters and vox-thieves the house lifewards had installed.

Whatever passed between her and Nemonix would be recorded.

Cordelia took herself over to a seat beneath a long mural. Its colours had faded over the centuries since its creation, but it was still an impressive piece of work.

‘The earliest days of Vondrak,’ said Nemonix, taking the seat opposite Cordelia and framing himself nicely in the viewfinder of the picter concealed in the bust of a long-dead ancestor of Lord Ohden. ‘Typical of similar artworks you’ll find on any number of Imperial worlds – heavy on symbolism and idealism, light on details that likely match the moment.’

‘I notice the Mechanicus feature heavily in it,’ said Cordelia. ‘A case of history being written by the victors?’

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Nemonix.

‘Is that what you hope to do with House Cadmus? Rewrite our history?’

‘I don’t follow, Lady Cordelia.’

‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘You are clearly not a foolish man, nor, I suspect, are you one given to wasting time, so I must presume you have come here to make me an offer like the one you made to Cassia.’

‘She told you of that?’

‘As you knew she would.’

Nemonix chuckled. ‘Yes, it was a statistical certainty she would speak of our conversation. Call it a declaration of intent, if you will. But, no, I’m not here to make an offer.’

‘Then shall I tell you why I think you’re here?’

Nemonix spread his arms wide. ‘Please do.’

‘The Mechanicus wants House Cadmus back in the bosom of the Red Planet, but if that’s not going to happen then you’ll happily see us destroyed.’

Nemonix didn’t answer, but Cordelia didn’t indulge the fantasy that she’d outmanoeuvred him.

The black-robed adept nodded. ‘If, for the moment, we assume you are correct, then what possible benefit does Cadmus gain by resisting a renewal of its ties with Mars?’

‘The knightly houses have always been free,’ said Cordelia, fighting to keep her anger in check at the adept’s bland confidence. ‘Since before there even was an Imperium or Mechanicus, the knightly houses have stood proud and autonomous.’

Nemonix laughed. ‘Really? Is that what you think?’

‘Free of the Mechanicus, at least.’

‘You’re forgetting the debt each knightly house owes to the servants of the Machine-God,’ said Nemonix, wagging a scolding finger. ‘Without their support, your precious machines would have turned to rust and scrap thousands of years ago.’

‘We have the Sacristans.’

‘Whom the Mechanicus train,’ pointed out Nemonix. ‘And you almost lost them at Verdus Ferrox.’

‘No thanks to you,’ spat Cordelia.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘Pray enlighten me.’

‘You let the tyranids in,’ said Cordelia, her fingers curling to fists on the arms of her chair. ‘Assembler Thexton personally checked every way in and out of that forge complex, yet suddenly culverts, waste viaducts and effluent channels open for no reason. Come on, how stupid do you think we are?’

‘Clearly stupid enough to accuse the Mechanicus of wilful sabotage when there is no data footprint to back up such a wild and unsubstantiated claim,’ said Nemonix.

Cordelia’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? You erase any data the Mechanicus doesn’t want revealed. You do the dark, manipulative things they can’t be seen to do. And then you make it all go away. Well, I’ll tell you this now, House Cadmus is not something you can make go away.’

Nemonix leaned forward in his chair, his hands laced before him. Cordelia tried to hide her revulsion at the smooth, doll-like nature of his fingers.

‘I can make anything go away,’ he said. ‘That picter you have hidden in the bust of Lord Ohden? You’ll find its data stream has, unfortunately, become irrevocably corrupted.’

Nemonix circled a finger above his head, like a squad sergeant indicating a regroup. ‘And the vox-thieves? Such a shame they were inadvertently tuned to a Guard vox-net and recorded an hour of chatter between two supremely unprofessional sentries on the eastern ramparts.’

Nemonix rose to his feet and smoothed out his robes, brushing non-existent specks of lint from his shoulders.

‘And I’d put another order in for that hot tisane if I were you. I think your request was accidentally deleted from the service cogitators.’

The pettiness of this last gesture seemed needless.

‘I didn’t want us to be disturbed,’ said Nemonix, reading the confusion on her face. ‘Not while I informed you that no matter what you do, House Cadmus will be part of the Mechanicus again. It would be best for everyone if Baron Roland understood that simple fact.’

Cordelia stood and took a long, shuddering breath. She counted to ten in her head to keep a lid on her fury.

‘Tell me one thing, at least,’ she said at last.

‘Of course.’

‘This Binary Apostle Roland was petitioned to retrieve? Does it even exist, or has the Mechanicus sent our men off to die?’

Nemonix nodded. ‘The Saint exists, and the mission is genuine. Kyrano and the tech-synod displaced from Gryphonne Four are desperate to have his essence, or at least what remains of it, returned.’

Nemonix turned and made his way to the chamber door.

‘Really, Lady Cordelia, you underestimate me,’ he said. ‘No one profits from the destruction of House Cadmus, but such blatant secession cannot be allowed. It’s the thin end of the wedge, you see.’

‘Get out,’ snapped Cordelia. ‘Get out now.’

‘Very well,’ said Nemonix. ‘But please believe me when I say that I hope your husband’s mission meets with success. I also trust he will make the right decision upon his safe return to Vondrak Prime.’

Cordelia’s anger turned to amusement.

‘Then you don’t know Roland at all.’

‘You’d be surprised how much I know,’ said Nemonix. ‘Goodbye, Lady Cordelia. We will not meet again, and you should not look for me. It would be… inadvisable.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Yes,’ said Nemonix.

My limbs feel stiff and ungainly, weak after days spent as a giant with the strength to tear apart battle tanks. Despite the cold, my Cadmus uniform jacket is soaked in sweat. My skin runs hot as my bloodstream filters out the numerous chemicals not yet purged from my circulatory system.

Together with Aktis Bardolf, Roderick, Anthonis and William, I follow Magos Vril through the frozen data holds at the heart of the main temple structure. Hundreds of harried-looking tech-priests fill the cavernous space, together with coffles of calculus-logi linked by loops of pulsing brass cabling.

Clattering engines plunge into abyssal vaults far below, and coiled generator towers soar into the upper peaks of the temple.

Geysers of warm, oil-scented mist billow up from below. Crackling arcs of lightning leap between the titanic machines.

‘Is it supposed to be doing that?’ asks Anthonis, peering over a slender railing.

‘Information [clarify]: no, Sir Anthonis of House Cadmus, it is most certainly not,’ answers Vril, working at a line of control slates with the hunched gait of someone who spends altogether far too much time poring over technical specs. ‘What you are seeing is the physical manifestation of an ancient mind in free-fall towards self-extinguishment.’

‘Can’t you stop it?’ asks William.

Vril pauses in his shuffling progress and turns to face William. He has a face quartered into differing metallic elements, not unlike the heraldic plates of a Knight. The upper two segments are bronze and iron, the lower two gold and brushed pewter. Each quadrant has an implant of some kind; either ocular, olfactory or vocal, though it is impossible to tell which is which.

‘Sir William of House Cadmus, the workings of encoded memory engrams are a mystery to all save the Omnissiah, dizzyingly more complex than your own meat brain and far more efficient. To have survived for so long, the Binary Apostle has had to evolve into a singularity of being, the mechanics of which are beyond your feeble reach of comprehension.’

‘And yours, by the sound of it,’ counters William, always ready with a rejoinder.

‘Does he even have a name?’ asks Roderick.

‘Is it even a he?’ puts in Bardolf.

Vril is greatly perturbed by these questions and flaps his arms like some hunched, flightless bird.

‘Yes, the Binary Apostle has a name, though it is one unknown to us,’ says Vril, before adding in a moment of rare largesse, ‘and perhaps even to itself.’

Before the others can rise to bait the magos some more, I cut to the more important matter at hand.

‘You said self-extinguishment,’ I say. ‘Is the Saint dying?’

‘Baron Roland, House Cadmus,’ says Vril, as though only now just confirming my identity. ‘The Binary Apostle is maintaining the brane shield, which is, as you are aware, keeping us alive, but the effort of doing so is destroying him.’

‘I have never heard of a brane shield,’ I say.

‘I should be surprised if you had,’ he says, holding up a hand to forestall any response at the implied insult to my intelligence. ‘It is incredibly ancient techno-arcana that relies on an understanding of M-theory. Do you possess such an understanding, Baron Roland?’

‘No, but I am a quick study.’

Vril pauses, no doubt trying to think of how he can explain something complex to a man he believes to be mentally subnormal.

‘The central conceit is that our visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane, that is, a membrane, inside a higher dimensional space,’ he begins, and already I feel any hope of comprehension fall away. ‘A theoretically infinite number of dimensions of potentially infinite scale occupy other branes, which, in effect, means there can be an endless series of alternate realities, intersecting with our own in ways we cannot possibly imagine in any currently posited cosmological model.’

The silence that follows his ‘explanation’ tells him all he needs to know of how much we have understood.

‘So a brane shield moves us out of the brane in which our known universe exists and into another,’ says Anthonis. ‘Now is that a pre-existing brane or a newly created one?’

We turn to look at Anthonis and he shrugs.

‘I have a lot of time to read now,’ is his explanation, and I almost burst out laughing until I remember why he now has a lot of time to read.

Adept Vril has the good grace to sound impressed when he says, ‘A simplistic way of interpreting a complex theory, but, in essence, correct. And in answer to your question, the field generator shifts us into the nearest unoccupied brane, one yet to develop its own internal universe. There we reside in splendid isolation. Nothing can interact with us, but nor can we interact with anything beyond the extent of the field until its deactivation returns us to our origin point.’

‘I can see why the Mechanicus want the Binary Apostle back,’ says Aktis Bardolf.

‘Indeed,’ says Vril.

‘How long will it take you to unhook the Manifold engine from this temple?’ I ask, returning to the matter at hand.

The hesitation between my question and Vril’s answer is not what I hope to hear.

‘The Apostle has dwelled within this temple for millennia and will not easily be parted from it,’ says Vril. ‘Like all of us, the Apostle is mistrustful of change, as there is no guarantee what is left of the memory engrams will survive such a severance.’

‘Then we will cease distracting you, Magos Vril,’ I say. ‘Work as fast as you can, and inform me of when you are ready to move the Manifold engine. But a word to the wise, be quick if you want it to survive.’

Our armour stands immobile in the circular courtyard towards the rear of the temple, like transhuman giants on a parade ground. Strange light diffracts over the curved plates, reflections that look like the underside of a frosted lake surface.

After hearing Magos Vril describe how we are kept safe from the tyranids beyond the temple, it is all I can do to keep my eyes from drifting to the disturbing sky I now know is not part of the universe to which I belong.

Workbenches dragged from the forge are arranged around the courtyard, and the warriors of both houses mingle and talk as we eat and drink.

As it turns out, we are not the only ones to have taken refuge here.

A nearby scholam has found sanctuary within the walls of the forge-temple. Perhaps a hundred progena and a few instructors, displaced from their training barracks, are also here. They sit on the other side of the courtyard, the youngsters staring in open-mouthed wonder at our armour.

No sooner had we climbed from within than a leather-tough veteran introduced himself with a powerful handshake and brisk salute.

‘Raym Bartaum, Drill Abbot of Scholam Vikara, Sir Knight. Myself and our progena are at your disposal,’ he’d said, and I accepted his declaration with pride.

Since then, Bartaum and his fellow drill abbots have been working their charges mercilessly with what few weapons they have left. That they will never survive to reach Vondrak Prime goes unsaid.

Before me, I have a tin cup filled with electrolyte-rich water, a plate of what I am assured is a high-calorific meal of sweet nutrient bars and a soup laced with slow-release stimulants.

I will need them all for the return leg of our journey.

Aktis Bardolf sits across from me, looking tired and pale. He is a mirror for how I feel. My initial low opinion of Hawkshroud has been banished. I have seen Bardolf and his Knights in action, and know they can be relied upon.

‘Have you seen the Freeblade?’ asks Bardolf.

‘No,’ I reply. ‘Not since he guided us in. And how do you know he is a Freeblade?’

‘What else would he be?’

I shrug. ‘The last of his house, or a lone survivor like one of your Oathsworn.’

Bardolf shakes his head. ‘The heraldry of a rearing unicorn? It’s not one of the major houses, nor any one of the minor ones.’

‘Perhaps he belongs to a house unknown to you.’

Bardolf snorts. ‘If I don’t know of a house, it’s because it doesn’t exist. Trust me, I know my houses.’

From anyone else I would chalk such a comment up to boastful arrogance, but from the little I have learned of Aktis Bardolf, such a trait does not feature in his makeup.

‘So what house do you think he was?’

‘Impossible to know,’ says Bardolf. ‘That’s the whole point of a Freeblade, isn’t it? The mystery.’

I hear the heavy clank of grinding metal I recognise as a damaged Knight. I turn from my food as the frost-blue and white form of the Freeblade limps into the courtyard. The progena halt their training until the drill abbots bellow at them to continue.

The trailing banner of a rearing white horse with a fluted horn at its forehead hangs tattered from the Knight’s shoulder plates. The Freeblade’s armour is badly damaged. Corrosive burns have exposed much of its inner mechanisms, and a portion of its right leg has fused together, giving the armour a swaying gait and an arrhythmic foot pattern.

The Knight stomps over the courtyard towards us.

Freeblades are notoriously unpredictable. Honourable, yes, and still bound by the knightly virtues, but they follow a solitary path. Whatever has driven this Knight to walk the lonely road of the Freeblade, sundered from all ties of kith and kin, gives him a purpose that no one but he can know.

I experience a momentary thrill at the sight of the power and majesty of a Knight as it towers over us. It is one thing to wear such a magnificent suit of armour, another to see it loom over you with its weapons armed.

‘I am Tellurus,’ says the Knight, an obviously artificially-generated voice emerging from a vox-grille concealed beneath his armour’s head-section. ‘Do I have the very great honour of addressing Baron Roland of House Cadmus and Viscount Bardolf of House Hawkshroud?’

‘You have,’ I say, looking over at Bardolf with an eyebrow raised.

‘What?’ he says to my wordless question. ‘I told you I wasn’t a lord.’

I look back up at the frost-blue Knight and say, ‘Will you not address us face to face, Sir Tellurus? Even if you wish to remain connected to your armour, at least open the canopy that we might converse as men.’

‘I will not, Baron Roland,’ says the Freeblade.

‘A man could take issue with such behaviour.’

‘A man might well, but no insult is intended,’ replies Tellurus. ‘I have vowed to speak only when clad in armour.’

I share a look with Bardolf. The few Freeblades I have met have all been individuals in the truest sense, each with their own quirks and foibles. Why should Tellurus be any different?

‘Very well,’ I say, willing to indulge Tellurus and his vanity. ‘What service might we render you, Sir Tellurus?’

‘How long have you been on Vondrak?’

‘House Cadmus is only recently arrived,’ I say.

‘House Hawkshroud has been in theatre for two months, give or take.’

Tellurus turns his head to Bardolf, as though the time I have spent on Vondrak is an irrelevance.

‘Tell me, Viscount Bardolf, in your time fighting the spawn of Hive Fleet Hydra, have you borne witness to their greatest abomination, a tervigon brood mother with crimson and cerulean plates across its back and a skull of bleached ivory?’

Tellurus raises his reaper blade, and I see that many of the serrated teeth are missing.

‘This monster would bear a great wound upon its flank. Deep enough to leave the metal of this blade in its exo-armour. Tell me, Sir Bardolf, have you seen the beast?’

Bardolf looks over at me and I shake my head. ‘We have not seen it, Sir Tellurus. I take it this is a beast you have crossed paths with before?’

‘Once,’ says Tellurus. ‘When it murdered my family and destroyed my house.’

Even though the Knight’s voice is generated by a machine, I hear a lifetime’s worth of pain.

‘You followed the beast to Vondrak?’ I ask.

‘I did,’ says Tellurus. ‘Reports of a Hydran tervigon that matched its description drew me to Vikara, but the beast is cunning and has thus far eluded me. Before I could follow rumours of fresh sightings, I was trapped in Magos Vril’s forge-temple.’

I stand and gesture to the many gashes on his armour. ‘You have seen vicious fighting in your pursuit of the tervigon. Could none of Vril’s tech-priests minister to your armour?’

‘No!’ snaps Tellurus. ‘I have my own hand-chosen Sacristans, but they remain sequestered in Vondrak Prime. They and they alone are permitted to tend my armour.’

Despite his tragic past, the Freeblade’s obstinacy is beginning to irritate me. I return to my seat.

‘We have not seen your beast,’ I say. ‘So is there anything further you require of us?’

‘Magos Vril has successfully coaxed the final engram of the Binary Apostle back into the Manifold engine,’ says Tellurus. ‘We abandon this temple within the hour.’

‘And you’re sure this is exactly how it happened?’ said Malcolm, pacing the echoing vault in which the Knights of House Cadmus were being repaired. ‘You can’t be wrong about this. Only absolute bloody certainty will do. You understand that, yes?’

‘Of course, Malcolm,’ replied Cassia, putting the book into her shoulder bag.

The noise filling the repair hangar drowned out their voices. Only they could hear the words that passed between them over the beating of forge hammers, rivet guns and sparking arc-welders.

‘What did you tell Cordelia?’

‘Exactly what you said to tell her,’ said Cassia. ‘That I’d told that terrible adept you’d never turn on Roland.’

‘Good,’ said Malcolm with a feral grin of raw ambition.

I do not pretend to comprehend the techno-sorcery of a brane shield, but to see it in action is to feel its working on a visceral level.

Its outer limits are marked by the same undersea-haze, desert-mirage we saw from the outside, with one crucial difference. From the outside, we saw a static image of the forge-temple as it was at the instant of the shield’s activation. From the inside we see the tyranid host, but they are ghosts to us, moving among us as phantoms.

The beasts are oblivious to us, as insubstantial as mist. They move among us like reflections on still water, separated by an infinitesimal skein of interdimensional membrane.

My Knights and those of Hawkshroud stand before the forge-temple’s vast, smoke-belching stacks. As Magna Preceptor, I stand at the point of our spearhead formation, with Aktis Bardolf to my right, Freeblade Tellurus at my left.

Our shadows leap and dance before us, thrown out by blazing spears of lightning rippling from every port in the temple as it counts down to extinction. Its regulatory systems are failing one after another. A Mechanicus forge-temple is basically a controlled reactor like those that hurl starships through the void. Only with constant rites of maintenance and continual calibration can they operate.

By Vril’s order, that control has now been removed.

Within the hour, the forge-temple will cease to exist.

As will everything within two kilometres.

Vril grieves the loss of his temple, but is practical enough to know that some of its data surviving is better than none.

A Mechanicus-grade Capitol Imperialis belches fumes from its upper surfaces, its cavernous vaults packed with tech-priests, lexmechanics and calculus-logi. They carry the combined data burden of the temple’s memory-engines. Protecting a Capitol Imperialis is a burden we could do without, but it is the only vehicle with a reactor capable of powering the Manifold engine holding the Binary Apostle over the journey to Vondrak Prime.

Atop the vehicle’s prow section sits a vast turret the size of a palace dome. Jutting from this turret is the enormous barrel of a macro cannon. Called by some a doomsday gun, it is a weapon capable of bringing down Titans with a single shell and punishing starships in low orbit.

The refugees of Scholam Vikara are spread around the Capitol Imperialis in their rag-tag fleet of vehicles. Most of them are thin-skinned cargo conveyors, open-topped and vulnerable.

Raym Bartaum, who it transpires has previous experience in tinkering with the engines of Imperial Guard super-heavies, has overcharged the engines, hoping to coax some extra speed. Magos Vril has turned a blind eye to his transgressions.

No matter how fast they can go, most, if not all of them, will be destroyed before we reach the mountains.

‘Are we ready?’ I ask Bardolf and Tellurus.

The Hawkshroud Knight crouches and rolls his shoulders.

‘As I’ll ever be.’

The Freeblade raises his reaper blade and the teeth begin to spin around its killing edge. They turn slowly, as though fighting to build up speed.

‘I am ready,’ says Tellurus.

Greasy smoke leaks from his reactor housing, streaking the rearing horse banner with a sheen of polychromatic oil burns. Hydraulic fluids leak from pulsing feed lines at his legs and shoulders. Were Tellurus a House Cadmus Knight, I would send him back to the Vault Transcendent, but he is a Freeblade and goes where he wills.

He will die today, and I will not dishonour his courage by asking him to abandon his armour.

‘Magos Vril?’ I say. ‘Initiate the shutdown.’

The panel before me hisses static, then Vril’s voice comes over the vox. Though he understands the necessity of what he has to do, it is still difficult for him.

‘Confirmation: initiating now.’

On the opposite side of the forge-temple, an eclectic mix of bulbous refinery carts attached to simple engines and ore haulers are moving. Crewed by the temple’s servitors, a hundred or more of these vehicles are now rumbling out to the edge of the brane field.

I know the instant the servitor convoy breaches the field. The apparitions of gaunts and larger beasts lift their heads as one, their screeching cries going unheard. Their motion reminds me of the behaviour of oceanic shoals, so precise and coordinated.

Leaping packs swarm and flow around and through the precincts of the temple, but we are shifted beyond their reach. They do not see or even know of our existence.

I sense the impatience of my armour’s former wearers.

I wait, letting the swarms fully take the bait of the servitor convoy. Right now, the beasts will be tearing open the vehicles and slaughtering the servitors. Only a few will have autonomy enough to fight back, but most will not have the capability to even raise a fist in their own defence.

Their deaths will serve a greater purpose.

A series of explosions from the upper reaches of the temple makes the decision for me. The ground shakes as buried reactors go into meltdown.

‘Knights of the Imperium,’ I shout. ‘We ride!’

GAUNTLET

Cordelia walked with Assembler Thexton through the rebuilding work of Verdus Ferrox. Load-lifters, cargo-8s and flat-bedded material haulers brought fresh-forged steel and adamantium for the bulk servitors and Mechanicus construction engines to undo the damage Malcolm’s Knights and the vanguard organisms had wrought.

The assembler’s face was pulled in a frown of confusion, and Cordelia had to hope her skill with the written word matched that of her oratory. She waited for Thexton to read her handwritten note a third time before speaking.

‘You understand what I am asking?’

‘Not clearly, my lady,’ said the head of House Cadmus’s Sacristans. ‘And I am not sure I want to.’

Shaven-headed, and with only the most basic physical augmentations, Thexton was still more human than Mechanicus. A servant of House Cadmus, he had, nevertheless, been trained by the priests of Mars and approaching him was a risk.

But it was a risk Cordelia considered worth taking.

It had long been an open secret that the Mechanicus intended the Sacristans to be their eyes and ears among the knightly houses. Despite their vast knowledge, the lords of the Red Planet singularly failed to understand the bonds of loyalty between a Knight and those who worked to maintain his armour.

Closer than an ancient chevalier and his squire, a Knight and his chosen Sacristan were bonded through the armour and the shared histories of those who had worn it. Though a Sacristan might never see real battle, he would have lived hundreds in his connection dreams.

‘You understand that you can’t just go looking for this, you have to find the absences,’ she said, stepping aside as a pair of lifter servitors stomped past on piston-augmented legs. They carried rebar stanchions for the viaduct Malcolm’s battle cannon had destroyed.

‘I have to look for what’s not there?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Then where would I begin?’

Cordelia halted and pointed to a towering construction cradle, its rigs and assembly scaffolds waiting for a war engine that would never come.

‘Do you see that construction cradle there?’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘Now, if I were to say there was a Reaver Titan berthed there right now, then your failure to see a Reaver would be good reason to think that there was no Reaver there, yes?’

‘Obviously.’

‘But if I were to tell you there was, say, a grain of sand in the berth, then your failure to observe it wouldn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there.’

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ said Thexton. ‘I am familiar with modus tollens, Lady Cordelia.’

‘Of course you are, my dear Thexton,’ continued Cordelia. ‘The important difference between these two scenarios is that in the one, but not the other, you would expect to see some evidence of the entity if, in fact, it existed.’

Thexton looked down at the note again. Cordelia could see the urge to speak a question aloud.

She shook her head. ‘Look for what’s not there.’

And the light of understanding smoothed the frown lines from Thexton’s face.

‘Ah, of course, I see! Like detecting a planet in a distant galaxy, one not visible to conventional intergalactic auspex, but which we know is there by the level of light it blocks from its star in transit or the variation in a nearby celestial body’s orbital period.’

Cordelia nodded, though she had no real understanding of what Thexton had just said.

‘Can you do it?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Thexton. ‘I believe I can.’

‘Then do it,’ said Cordelia. ‘And do it quickly.’

I do not see the first of my Knights fall, but I feel them.

Their deaths are a knife stabbing up into my gut. Monteil and Creig. Their bio-sign vanishes from my slate, but there is no time to stop.

No time to mourn.

We go on or we die.

Two dozen Knights is a force to be reckoned with, and the wedge of Cadmus’s charge has punched through the beasts milling at this flank of the forge-temple. Most have been lured by the sacrificial convoy of servitors, but not all.

Cadmus battle cannons and thermal lances smash through the swarms of creatures, tearing a path for the others. In pulsing blasts of superheated lances and ground-shaking detonations we cut our way to the mountains.

Were it just the Knights who were escaping, I would rate our chances of success as high. But it is not only Knights who must escape Vikara. For a vehicle so monstrous in size, the Capitol Imperialis is fast, and I dread to think what safeguards Vril has authorised his engineering crews to disregard.

As fast as it is, it is still too slow.

At least a thousand gaunts swarm its tracks and flanks. Point-defence bolter racks flay them from its sides and try to keep them at bay. Hawkshroud are tasked with close protection for the Capitol Imperialis. Bardolf’s Knights circle the lumbering vehicle within its void envelope, gunning down the endless tide of pouncing creatures seeking to climb its cliff-like flanks.

Hurricanes of stubber fire pulp beasts seeking to foul its tracks with their bodies. Reapers tear those climbing its flanks. I know they will not stop them all. The best they can hope for is to stop enough.

I turn my head and see thousands of xenoforms, everything from the smaller, hook-limbed creatures to the lumbering battering ram beasts with vast crab claws and bio-plasmic energies screaming in their jaws. Already my auspex cannot cope with the sheer volume of hostile creatures coming for us.

Simian horrors with drooling orifices on their serrated backs vomit spiralling scraps of organic matter. Flesh-sacs filled with acid or poisons so lethal they could kill hundreds with a single drop arc through the air towards us.

We intercept some with stubber fire. They explode in mid-air, showering the earth with toxic rain, but there are simply too many to stop.

The progena of Scholam Vikara are fighting from the backs of their flimsy vehicles. They are armed with rifles and pistols and swords. Weapons so tiny and ineffectual that it takes my breath away that men still take to the battlefield with them.

The courage it takes to do so humbles me.

Three of their vehicles have already been overrun, reduced to blazing wrecks within the first hundred yards of our race to the city wall. A cargo-8 flips over in a seething explosion of jade-green bio-plasma.

Burning bodies tumble from its rear. I cannot hear their screams, and I am thankful. I have heard men die as tyrannic poisons devour them, and it is a sound I wish never to hear again.

A fleshy spore sac explodes above me. I throw up my shield as a spatter of hissing corrosives spray from its death. I clench my teeth in pain as acid eats at my shoulders.

Another Knight dies. Rabert, a warrior of honourable pedigree from one of Raisa’s most ancient families. His consort, Valerie, is with child, and his loss is a terrible blow for her and Cadmus. Unlike Monteil and Creig, I see Rabert die. Acids have eaten away his ankle joint and though he limps onwards, still firing, still cutting with his reaper, he has been slowed enough.

One of the larger beasts intercepts him. It crushes his shoulder with a vast, serrated claw and tears it free with no more effort than I might rip a Raisan mutant in half. It spits a gout of seething bio-plasma in Rabert’s face and the convulsions wracking his armour tell me of his death agonies.

Other beasts drag Rabert down, and his mount is overwhelmed by their alien bodies. Blade-limbs hack and talons rend his armour to reach the flesh within.

A shell from my battle cannon obliterates Rabert’s screaming killer. I cannot yet mourn his death, but I can avenge it.

Ahead, I see a host of beasts emerge from a disintegrating pile of tumbled blocks and twisted steelwork that was once a blockhouse on Vikara’s outer wall.

Right away, I see there are too many for us.

I ready my battle cannon, but before I can fire my auto-senses cut out for an instant as the thunder of something impossibly loud and blindingly bright overloads them.

The swarms in front of me vanish in a wall of fire with a seismic thunderclap.

The shockwave staggers me.

I crash into an adjacent wall, gyros fighting to keep me upright. Fire and smoke mushroom skyward from a titanic detonation.

A five hundred metre length of the city wall has vanished, taking with it the swarms gathered to block our escape. All that remains is a vitrified crater of smoking, glassy rock.

Only one weapon has the power to wreak so much destruction.

‘The way ahead is clear,’ says Magos Vril. ‘You’re welcome.’

I do not waste the path the doomsday gun of the Capitol Imperialis has carved us. I push hard through the raging vortices of searing thermals, low-grade e-mag pulses and surging smoke banks.

My auspex distorts, but then I am through.

I see the jagged peaks of the mountains ahead, like a wave of rock crashing on the horizon.

Three kilometres distant.

So close I can almost touch them.

The Capitol Imperialis crunches over the scorched wasteland its weapon has wrought. Hawkshroud’s Knights keep close, as though it is a livestock animal being kept safe from predator packs. The trucks and cargo-8s of Scholam Vikara bounce over the shattered landscape, and I dread to think of the pain they must be feeling driving through the firestorm of the macro cannon’s aftermath.

The beasts do not pursue. A collapse of the overmind’s control? Or animal instinct, making them fearful of the macro cannon’s wrath?

It will not take long for the crushing will of the hive to smother that fear with blind fury.

But in that time we run.

Nemonix sat cross-legged in his featureless, data-tight cell at the heart of the forge-temple. Myriad means of information-gathering had provided him with tens of thousands of hours of vox and twice that in pict-feeds, spread across the hundreds of sealed-off data-slates spread on the floor of the cell.

Specialised neural augmentation processed the swathes of information in the time it took to look at each one.

Collected from all across Vondrak, Nemonix had secrets enough to bring down the planetary nobility a hundred times over, to blackmail a dozen senior Guard officers and see the name of a decorated Space Marine blackened for all time.

None of that was of any interest to Nemonix.

All that mattered was Cadmus.

His gambit to have their Sacristans killed by allowing infiltrating vanguard organisms into Verdus Ferrox – thereby forcing Cadmus to fall upon the mercy of Mars or suffer a slow extinction through obsolescence and battle damage – had failed, but he had learned a great deal of the knightly house’s internal politics over the last few days.

Not enough to bring them crawling back to the Mechanicus just yet, but Nemonix was playing a long game. And stripped of mortal concerns of the flesh, he had patience enough to wait.

The hologram of his earlier self paced restlessly around him. An affectation, he knew. It had no capacity for boredom and no need for so overt a display of disinterest.

‘I wish you’d stop that,’ he said.

‘Why are we still here?’ said the hologram. ‘Malcolm is on the hook, and it’s only a matter of time until he challenges Roland. And with the technology you can provide, his mastery of House Cadmus is a certainty.’

‘I want to be sure,’ said Nemonix.

‘How much surer can you be?’ said the hologram. ‘You heard them talking in the repair hangars. His consort has already lied to Lady Cordelia. You saw his naked ambition. It’s done.’

‘I want to be sure,’ repeated Nemonix.

‘Then don’t let Roland and any of his Knights back in the city,’ said his hologram, stopping in front of him. ‘Take control of Rukanah’s guns and shoot them down before they’re even in sight of the walls. Blame a malfunction, bad code, whatever. You want sure, that’s sure.’

Nemonix looked up from the hundreds of slates.

‘You know, sometimes I forget what a ruthless man I was.’

SACRIFICES

The run to the mountains has been swift and unrelenting. Two of Bardolf’s Knights died moments ago, holding a narrow pass while the rest of us continued uphill. Packs of airborne predators swarm us in slashing flocks, but massed stubber fire and flailing reaper blades are keeping them at bay for now.

Behind us, Vikara is an atomic wasteland, a seething nightmare of fire and radiation. A thick column of lightning-shot smoke claws its way skywards from the destruction of the forge-temple.

The swarms surrounding it are ash, and even those that survived the temple’s destruction spent precious minutes milling in confusion.

And with those minutes we may just have bought our lives.

Incredibly, around half of Scholam Vikara’s progena are still with us. Raym Bartaum shouts at the youngsters riding the damaged vehicles with smoking sides and tracks shredded with chitinous spines. Many of the progena are badly hurt, but they make no complaint as Bartaum and another drill abbot all but drag them onto the least damaged trucks and transports.

The exit Hawkshroud’s guns tore in the mountainside is nowhere near large enough for the Capitol Imperialis, but our battle cannons are tearing it wider in a cacophony of thudding, rocky detonations. Rubble falls from the mountain in a thunderous avalanche.

‘Its macro cannon could widen this with one shot,’ says Tellurus, the rear of his armour belching smoke. Its exhaust vents glow cherry red, the power plant in imminent danger of a catastrophic meltdown.

‘But would likely collapse the tunnel entirely,’ says Bardolf, hacking away boulders with his reaper. ‘It’s too much of a risk.’

Bardolf is probably right, but I wonder if it might not be worth the risk to see this opening widened quicker. After what is probably only moments, but feels like hours, the entrance is finally cleared enough for the Capitol Imperialis.

‘Must hurry,’ says Bardolf, walking his Knight around the back of the descending Capitol Imperialis. I follow his gaze and see monstrously large, spider-like beasts on the horizon.

Titanic bio-killers with vast, chitinous legs and thousands of scuttling brood hordes clinging to their distended bellies. Bio-plasmic energies flicker between the bio-titans’ legs and in their flanged jaws. Drooling sphincter cannons smoulder with toxins. Barbed tongues lash the air.

A Knight is a powerful war machine, but even we are no match for such a monstrous biological engine of destruction and consumption.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Must hurry.’

We are in darkness again, following the subterranean rail network back to Vondrak Prime. A parting shot of the macro cannon has demolished the entrance behind us.

Nothing now will be getting in that way.

Ten hours have passed since we descended into the death-choked tunnels once more. We are making good time following the route mapped by the auspex on our way to Vikara. For all that the uncertainty of our path has been removed, none of the horror at what those trapped here suffered has lessened.

The fire-blackened walls still echo with the screams of those trapped when the tunnels were sealed against the tyranids. Their bodies are all around us, dead in their vehicles or sprawled where they clawed at the rock in futile hope of escape.

There is no need to hunt for gaps in the abandoned vehicles. Vril’s Capitol Imperialis simply crushes them beneath its enormous weight.

‘Forgive us,’ I say, hearing the squeal of crumpling metal and imagining the crack of splitting bone and snapping sinew.

Bardolf and I lead the way through the tunnels, giant arc lights on the cliff-like frontis of the Capitol Imperialis piercing the darkness ahead. The shadows of our armour stretch out before us.

Moisture drizzles my canopy like tears.

I keep my attention focused on the auspex. The naked eye sees too many shadows, too many places to hide. I move mechanically, pushing my Knights on as fast as I can without leaving our fellows behind.

The clamour of the armour’s previous occupants is growing painful. It will be good to be divested of them for a time. Until the void they leave in my soul drives me to reconnect once more.

All I want is to get out of these damned tunnels.

I want to return to Cordelia.

Each step I make, every turn I take, each passageway that brings me closer to Vondrak Prime serves that one aim. I cannot help but let out a shuddering breath of relief when the auspex confirms what I now see with my own eyes.

We have reached the widest tunnel, the main arterial that leads back to the surface. Is that a tiny spot of light I see in the distance? Or is it simply wishful thinking to imagine we have reached our ingress point?

The auspex screeches a warning, and my vision veils in red.

Chittering beasts swarm the walls, pouring from sundered vents and ruptured ductwork all around us.

Stablights reflect from innumerable hardened carapaces and bulbous, hairless skulls. Multiple limbs are wet with secreted mucus. Razored claws glitter in the beams.

I see teeth and black, gem-like eyes.

Fangs scrape rock as they leap onto the roof and flanks of the Capitol Imperialis in droves. More drop to the ground in predators’ crouches. Too many to count.

They hiss and screech. Black tongues taste the air.

My shout of warning names these monsters.

‘Genestealers!’

Malcolm shuddered as connection plugs slotted home in his spinal ports. He felt the rush of power to his limbs and blinked as his sight was enhanced by the numerous onboard systems of his armour.

Verdus Ferrox became cover and angles, a battle zone with avenues of attack, rally points and kill zones.

The Knights left to him by Roland came to life around him, each one flexing and twisting as human and machine flowed together in seamless union. Jaime Garratt took the first step forward. Typical of the young buck.

Enoch and Silus waited for him. Stefan lifted his reaper, its teeth revving in anticipation of a fight.

Which there might be if things didn’t go to plan.

Malcolm didn’t want bloodshed, but he was prepared for it.

Farrimond sat in the canopy of his hastily repaired Knight, his movements a little too slow for Malcolm’s liking.

‘I should order you to remain behind,’ said Malcolm.

‘Just try it,’ retorted Farrimond.

‘At least one of us needs to survive if this goes to hell.’

‘You think it will?’ asked Garratt.

‘More than likely, but it’s got to be done if Cadmus are ever to become truly great.’

‘Then let’s get started,’ said Garratt.

Malcolm nodded and marched his Knight through Verdus Ferrox. Sacristans scattered before him, and idly he wondered why Thexton hadn’t been overseeing the repairs.

At the head of his Knights, Malcolm reached the gates of the forge-temple. They rumbled open, and Malcolm paused in his advance as he saw the women assembled on the other side.

Lady Cordelia stood at their head, with Aikaterina and Aeliana to either side. Cassia held her book clutched close to her chest, head bowed and just behind Roland’s wife.

Cordelia took a step forward, her face cut from defiance.

‘You understand what you’re doing?’ she asked.

Malcolm leaned his Knight armour down until his head was just above Cordelia. She looked up at him without fear.

For someone so small, someone he could crush without breaking stride, there was strength and cold calculation to Cordelia he hadn’t noticed until recently.

‘You’re bloody right I understand,’ he said.

‘Once you commit to this path, there’s no turning back.’

‘I’m not one for turning back, Lady Cordelia,’ said Malcolm. ‘You ought to know that about me by now.’

‘Battle cannon,’ I say.

The command activates a red-ringed kill reticule. Too many possible targets. The auspex struggles to fix on a firing solution. I override it and shoot without aiming.

Recoil feedback shocks my arm. It feels good.

Twin shells explode in the genestealer swarm. I fire two more. Another two. I am trying to clear a path, but there are just too many of the swift-moving beasts.

Bardolf appears at my side. His Knight adds its own weapon to the barrage. More and more of the beasts are closing in. Stubber fire and battle cannons rip into the pack ahead of us.

And then they are among us.

Claws that make a mockery of armour tear at the plates of my legs. I stifle a scream as I feel every hurt. They scramble up my body like Whiteshields on an assault course.

I crush some with my battle cannon. My relic blade slashes down. Left and right. The roaring of the blade is magnified tenfold in the confines of the tunnel.

I crush xenoforms beneath my feet, and I feel their bodies burst apart.

The point defence guns of the Capitol Imperialis rake indiscriminately throughout the tunnel. Magos Vril knows his guns can inflict only minimal harm to our armour but will be deadly to the genestealers.

I lose track of the battle, my situational awareness completely lost as I stagger through the tunnel with a score of genestealers clinging to my armour. Something jars my leg and I go down on one knee amid an abandoned convoy of fuel tankers, crushing the nearest one open. Viscous fluid gushes out, and I rear up to hurl genestealers from my carapace.

Tellurus is fighting like a man possessed, his damaged reaper blade hewing the screeching killers with finesse that is frankly astonishing. His Knight moves with a speed and precision I have never before seen.

Aktis Bardolf fights with his Knights, still honouring their duty to protect the Capitol Imperialis. House Cadmus rally to me, and we fight in a circle of Knights, many fewer than began this mission for Arch Magos Kyrano.

Roderick flays the beasts from my legs with snap fire from his stubbers. William and Anthonis join our circle of resistance, firing battle cannons and thermal lances.

Another Knight’s bio-sign winks out.

My auspex is too crowded, I cannot see who has died.

The tunnel is a strobing nightmare of light and dark. The aliens have smashed the great arc lights on Vril’s mechanical leviathan. Only the stablights of the Knights spin and dip and rise as we fight for our lives.

More genestealers are boiling from the cracks in the walls and through the internal ducting systems. I see a handful burst apart, shot down by collimated fire from a rapidly moving trio of cargo-8s.

The last of the progena are still alive.

I see Raym Bartaum in the back of a vehicle that surely should not still be able to function, let alone lead others across the detritus of battle that fills the tunnel.

He looks up at my Knight and I see where they are going.

I want to shout to him, but there is no link between us. I did not bother to establish a vox-protocol between us, thinking he and his charges would be dead before we reached the mountains.

How arrogant of me. How dismissive of ordinary human heroism that seems. I cannot stop him, so I do the next best thing. I honour what will be a supreme sacrifice.

‘All Knights,’ I say. ‘Brace for impact.’

Arch Magos Kyrano was used to the insolence of knightly houses, especially Cadmus, but to hear such demands from the mouth of a mere consort was a step too far.

He stood on a postern platform in the centre of his forge-temple’s main gate, looking down on a sight that was, for want of a better word, rebellion.

‘Clarification: is this some kind of a joke?’

‘It’s about as far from being a joke as it’s possible to get,’ Lady Cordelia of House Cadmus called up to him. Baron Roland’s consort stood with a collection of Cadmus Knights and their consorts standing with her.

Had it not been for the seriousness of her demand, he would have laughed aloud.

‘This is entirely out of order,’ said Kyrano.

‘I want to see Adept Nemonix.’

‘Who?’

‘Adept Nemonix,’ said Cordelia. ‘Your attack dog. The adept you sent to yoke Cadmus back under Martian control.’

‘No such adept resides within my forge,’ said Kyrano, pleased to be so certain this woman was deranged. ‘Yes, I petitioned the dataproctors to despatch an adept, but he never arrived on Vondrak.’

‘You know, I think you truly believe that, arch magos,’ said Cordelia. ‘Which makes you as much a victim of his manipulations as House Cadmus.’

‘Lady Cordelia, don’t you think that if there was an unregistered adept in my forge-temple I would know about it?’

‘I think maybe you did, but that you’ve forgotten.’

‘My neural augmentations do not forget anything.’

‘I know he is in your forge,’ said Cordelia, dragging forward a man in the robes of a Sacristan. ‘Assembler Thexton might just be a Sacristan to you, but he’s rather clever and meticulous when it comes to finding things.’

‘Lady Cordelia, I assure you that–’

‘Shut up, I’m not finished,’ said Lady Cordelia. ‘Adept Nemonix is very clever at erasing his presence of and clouding the workings of machines and people who rely on machines for their memories. But when you know what to look for or, rather, what absences to look for, it’s actually quite simple to find someone who thinks he can’t be found.’

Kyrano shook his head in exasperation. ‘I literally have no idea what you are talking about, Lady Cordelia. And I do not have time for riddles and foolishness.’

Baron Roland’s consort sighed and lifted a hand. ‘It’s very simple, arch magos,’ she said. ‘Either you open your gates or I’ll have Sir Malcolm and his Knights here blow them off.’

The threat of violence against his forge horrified Kyrano, but he wasn’t about to be dictated to by a consort.

Before he could respond to Lady Cordelia’s threat, a heavy bass note of clattering gears and the motion of immense cogs sounded from within the gate housing. The twin leaves of the gate split apart and began to swing outwards with a ponderous, stately motion.

‘What did you do?’ demanded Kyrano, horrified at this gross intrusion within his sanctum sanctorum. ‘This is a violation of the Cardinal Rights of the Mechanicus, as laid down by the Binary Saints themselves!’

‘Not me,’ said Cordelia, as the Knights marched through the opening gates with their weapons raised. ‘I suspect you’ll find that Adept Nemonix just let us in.’

The trucks of the progena race towards the stalled convoy of fuel tankers. Coming from who knows where, the tanker crews were within sight of safety when the rock fall that sealed the tunnel also sealed their doom.

Raym Bartaum stands in the rear cargo compartment. He has an exotic-looking weapon pulled tight to his shoulder, one with a conical snout and a coiled magnetic accelerator. I recognise it as a Mark XXXV Magnacore. Bartaum handles it with the aplomb of a veteran soldier.

The Knights have seen what I see and know what is coming.

Twin bolts of blue-white fire streak from Bartaum’s plasma gun. Too fast for the eye to follow, the first strikes the tanker I broke open when I was driven to my knees. The second punches through the armoured skin of the tanker behind it.

The promethium within ignites with a deafening thunderclap.

And the darkness is banished utterly as tens of thousands of litres of volatile fuel gel explode. The blast vaporises Bartaum’s vehicle instantly as a roiling pressurised fireball fills the tunnel with a deafening roar.

Searing heat fills the pilot’s compartment of my armour. Awful, intolerable heat that fuses many of its delicate control mechanisms. I feel the skin of my arms burn on the metal restraints of the Throne Mechanicus.

I feel the pain of those fires, but I will survive.

The genestealers have no protection at all.

I see them consumed as the churning clouds of flame burn them to greasy residue on my canopy. The flame roars back down the tunnel, burning the markings from our armour and rendering us equals. House gonfalons and kill banners are burned to ash, and our weapons are rendered useless in the blink of an eye as ammo feeds and fuel flasks detonate.

The pain is incredible, but survivable.

I hear the screeching cries of the aliens over the roar of the flames. Like insects burning under the lens of a magnifying glass or a mutant with its belly torn open and wailing to be finished.

The heat continues to rise, the confines of the tunnel intensifying the power of the inferno. I turn my armour towards the light above us and push through the billowing clouds of living flame.

‘With me!’ I shout over the vox. The heat within my armour sears my throat. I can barely breathe, and I can only hope my Knights and Hawkshrouds hear the order.

Sealed within the Capitol Imperialis, Magos Vril and his adepts will be safe from the fires spreading farther down the tunnel. If any other xenos organism has managed to follow us into the tunnels, it will be in for a fiery shock.

I stagger through the hellish conflagration. Each step I take is a victory. The heat in my armour is too much.

My vision blurs. Sweat coats me like a second skin.

I push on.

Every auspex and external sensory apparatus is gone, flash-burned in the instant of the tankers’ detonation. I can no longer tell how far I am from the surface.

As I climb the trammelled slope of the tunnel, the rhomboid of daylight grows larger and larger. I can almost feel the cold, clear air being pulled down into the underground network. I open my canopy and suck in a lungful of fresh air, gasping as the chill of the surface touches my skin. The sensation is painful, but welcome. My eyes hurt and I blink away stinging tears.

I see a blurred, angular shape silhouetted at the mouth of the tunnel and know we have escaped.

‘Sir Gregor?’ I say. ‘Sir Martyn?’

Neither of the Knights I left to guard the entrance answers, but I am not surprised. So many of my armour’s systems are damaged or destroyed that it is a wonder I am able to stay upright, let alone maintain command and control.

I keep going, and the shape resolves in front of me.

It is not Sir Gregor.

Nor is it Sir Martyn.

The lictor vaults towards my open canopy. Its legs slam into my chest and whipping lengths of clawed, sinewed hooks dig into the plates of my armour. A tentacle-fronded jaw spreads wide, exposing fangs that hinge out in all directions.

I cannot move. I cannot evade this attack.

Mantis claws like scythes stab for my chest.

Before they impale me, a length of scorched steel intercepts them. Broken saw-blade teeth roar a handspan from my skull.

The reaper twists and slices up, tearing through the lictor’s arms. The creature looses a howling screech of pain. The flesh-hooks embedded in my armour loosen as the lictor fights to free itself.

It is not fast enough.

Tellurus brings his blade back down and hacks the beast in two with dazzling speed. Alien blood detonates from its execution, drenching me in unclean viscera.

The shorn halves fall from my armour. Pink ropes of wet sinew still dangle from my canopy.

Aktis Bardolf appears at my side and uses the fused, useless remains of his battle cannon to scrape away the lictor’s remains. A number of bony, cartilaginous hooks remain embedded in the metal cowl of my compartment.

‘Told you we were being followed,’ he says.

APOTHEOSIS

Cordelia walked with her head held high. As the consort of Baron Roland, she was no stranger to unusual places. House Cadmus had travelled to planets so different from Vondrak or Raisa that she was surprised they were still considered part of the Imperium.

But the interior of a forge-temple was something else entirely. Its workings, layout and ergonomics owed nothing to the human form and everything to the logic of a facility for machinery.

Its iron-framed processionals, steam-wreathed halls and pounding mechanical heartbeat were not for those whose concerns were of flesh and blood. She sensed, if not outright hostility from the temple, at least a measure that she was walking in a place that did not welcome flesh.

Behind her, Malcolm’s Knights kept their pace slow, one step for every ten the consorts took. Their weapons were locked and loaded, and though she hoped they would not need to fight, the threat of violence was a very real possibility.

She emerged into a wide, glass-roofed space: a cathedral to the machine. Its walls were iron panels, acid-etched with scriptural binary, holy circuits and cog-toothed emblems of Mars. Silk-steel banners hung from soaring arches overhead, and beams of variegated light in precise spectra arced through the space.

A vast engine dominated the far wall, like a templum organ, but belching steam instead of hymnala and criss-crossed by clanking chains, slowly rotating gears and hissing pistons that boomed and thudded like the heartbeat of a sleeping god.

Where a templum might be expected to have pews upon which its worshippers might rest their weary bodies, this machine temple made no such concessions to comfort. The floor was metalled, inscribed with angular lines, strange symbols and annotations that looked like the interior of a logic engine but were probably something else.

‘Lady Cordelia,’ said a black-robed figure at the foot of the giant machine wall. His voice easily carried the hundreds of metres between them, amplified by either the temple’s acoustics or some innate property of his voice.

‘Adept Nemonix,’ she replied.

With her knightly escort, Cordelia marched towards the adept. A dataproctor, that was what Kyrano had called him. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but didn’t let that show.

Nemonix was not alone. A shape limned with a haze of light was partially obscured by the adept.

‘Is that a hologram?’ said Cassia, clutching her book to her chest as though it were the most important thing in the world.

Right now, Cordelia supposed it was.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a hologram.’

‘Who do you think it is?’ asked Aeliana.

Cordelia said nothing, knowing that Nemonix would be able to hear every word that passed between them. It didn’t do to reveal your ignorance to an enemy.

They were halfway across the cathedral when Arch Magos Kyrano emerged from a chain-hung transept. Blessed oil ran down the chains, and the ten skitarii warriors that followed him in glossy crimson battleplate gleamed with viscous trails of lubricant. Gleaming droplets fell from the perforated barrels of the tech-guards’ oversized weaponry.

‘I think the arch magos is as angry as you,’ said Aeliana.

‘Angrier, I’d say,’ replied Cassia.

‘He’s going to get even angrier in a minute,’ said Cordelia.

Neither Adept Nemonix nor his unknown hologram had moved or said anything further since his initial acknowledgement.

At last, Cordelia and her Knights reached Nemonix at exactly the same time as Kyrano and his skitarii, a precise moment that couldn’t have come about by accident.

The hologram accompanying Nemonix regarded the skitarii impassively. Its body language was maddeningly familiar to Cordelia, and it took her a moment to understand why.

‘Surely these guns aren’t necessary?’ said the hologram. ‘After all, I’m on your side.’

‘What is the meaning of this?’ demanded Kyrano. ‘Why is this hologram addressing me as though it has any right to a voice? And why do you have no identifying signifier or biometrics within your noospheric aura? I demand you identify yourself.’

‘I am Adept Nemonix of the dataproctors,’ said Nemonix. ‘And I am here at your express request, arch magos. I know you have no memory of such a request, but such is the price of utilising the unique skill-set of a dataproctor. I was never here and never will be. I leave no trace of my passing, no evidence of my work. All that remains are the results of what was asked of me.’

‘Except that’s not quite true,’ said Cordelia.

‘You were right,’ said the hologram, turning its shimmering gaze upon her. ‘She’s a feisty one, this one.’

‘I pity you, Adept Nemonix,’ said Cordelia. ‘How lonely a life must it be that you need a hologram of yourself to keep you company?’

‘Not lonely at all,’ replied Nemonix. ‘And please spare me the psychoanalysis – I get enough of that from him.’

‘Shall I tell you why I’m here?’ said Cordelia.

‘I already know why you’re here.’

‘I’m not sure you do.’

Nemonix sighed. ‘I assure you that when it comes to a contest of who knows more, I’ll win.’

‘Neither of you should be here,’ snapped Kyrano. ‘This is my forge-temple.’

Cordelia fastened her gaze on the arch magos.

‘By your actions, warriors of House Cadmus are dead,’ she said. ‘You don’t get to talk here, you get to listen.’

‘No, Lady Cordelia,’ said Nemonix. ‘You get to listen. I came here with the express purpose of returning House Cadmus to the aegis of the Mechanicus. You know this. What you do not appreciate is that the outcome was never in doubt. Cadmus will restore the Cog to its heraldry and submit its future servitude to Mars or it will be destroyed.’

‘I have Knights here who may see things differently.’

Nemonix laced his hands before him and walked through the assembled consorts. He glanced at Cassia as he passed and stopped before one of the Cadmus Knights.

‘Sir Malcolm might not share your opinion,’ said Nemonix.

The canopy of the Knight split open, the head-section opening to reveal the belligerent form of Sir Malcolm.

‘This is your moment, Sir Malcolm,’ said Nemonix. ‘Seize this chance for greatness. You’re ready to take command from Roland, and with the aid of the Mechanicus, House Cadmus will be yours.’

Malcolm glared down at Nemonix.

‘You know the trouble with someone like me?’ said Malcolm. ‘If I can screw something up, I’ll pick the worst possible time to screw it up because it’s funnier that way.’

Nemonix might be inscrutable behind his mask, but the look of shock on the face of his hologram was priceless.

‘I heard you,’ said Nemonix. ‘I heard you and Lady Cassia talking of accepting my offer. You told her to lie to Lady Cordelia.’

‘At Lady Cordelia’s request,’ said Malcolm with a grin.

Cordelia held out a hand. Cassia handed her the book she carried.

‘Let me explain it to you as simply as I can, Adept Nemonix,’ said Cordelia. ‘Cassia here is, as I’m sure you’re aware, Sir Malcolm’s consort. Like many Knightly consorts, she indulges her pastimes in quaintly anachronistic ways. Aeliana here plays her viola bereft of aural augmentation or dexterity enhancers. Aikaterina bore a child without pain balms or medicae-servitors. And Cassia here is an inveterate diarist. She keeps copious notes, all of them handwritten. You should see the chambers she shares with Malcolm in Golem Keep, wall-to-wall books, all filled with journal entries concerning her days. Everything from what she ate, who she saw and what she did and thought. I’ve only read the most recent of them, of course, and while I could do without the passages concerning Malcolm’s prowess in the bedchamber, her detailed notes about you, Adept Nemonix, are most interesting.’

‘Notes in a book? That’s all you have?’

‘Detailed notes,’ said Cordelia. ‘Including all the things I asked her and Malcolm to talk about openly. After your visit to my chambers, I realised you could probably hear and see everything that went on in Vondrak Prime. I just gave you what you wanted to hear. I made sure we never spoke openly and only communicated through Cassia’s journal.’

Nemonix rounded on Malcolm.

‘I heard you lay claim to Baron Roland’s position,’ he said. ‘I know you want to lead Cadmus. It burns you every day that Roland keeps beating you in the Cull. It could all have been yours, Sir Malcolm, all you had to do was let me help.’

‘You really don’t understand us, do you, you stupid arse?’ said Malcolm. ‘A Knight has honour and duty hardwired into him from the moment of his Rite of Becoming. You really thought I’d betray Roland? I don’t like him, I never have. I’m convinced I’d be a better leader for Cadmus, but if I have to take command without honour, then what’s the point? I’ll win the Cull soon enough, but I’ll do it without any damn help from you.’

Nemonix turned on his heel and stood before Arch Magos Kyrano. His fury was obvious, and Cordelia tried not to let her satisfaction show.

‘Lady Cordelia thinks she has the upper hand, but shall I show her how mistaken she is?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Kyrano.

‘I mean that I will fulfil my obligation to you,’ said Nemonix. ‘Cadmus will either return to the Mechanicus or it will be destroyed. Show them.’

This last comment was directed towards his hologram, which held out a hand that stretched and grew into the outline of a shimmering pict capture.

Cordelia let out a sigh of relief as she saw a grainy image of Roland’s Knight and a host of others emerging from a vast tunnel. They crossed an enormous turn-plate upon which sat a damaged hauler-engine.

The largest vehicle Cordelia had ever seen followed them, a towering leviathan of a thing. Every one of the Knights looked damaged, but at least they were alive.

‘Right now, I have control of a dozen of Colonel Harun Rukanah’s artillery pieces,’ said Nemonix. ‘Heavy guns all. Basilisks, Bombards and Manticores. And every one of them is currently targeted upon that turn-plate.’

Cordelia felt her skin grow clammy, but she had once last ace to play.

‘How long do you think those other knightly houses under Mechanicus control will remain so when they learn what you did here?’

‘They won’t learn of it, that’s the point,’ said Nemonix. ‘It’s what I do.’

‘I assure you they will,’ said Cordelia. ‘You might be able to manipulate machines and data, but you can’t change what people remember, and I’ve made sure that every member of House Cadmus has read what Cassia wrote in her journal. They’ve made their own copies too. Every word she wrote of what you’ve tried to do here is part of their very organic brains.’

‘And you think that matters?’

Cordelia knew she would never change Nemonix’s mind, and turned to the one man who could.

‘Of course it does,’ said Cordelia to Arch Magos Kyrano. ‘Don’t let him do this. Look at that pict feed. Roland has done what you asked. He’s brought the Binary Apostle back to Vondrak Prime. If you let him kill him, you’re a traitor to your own kind, a murderer and a violator of human minds, no better than the beasts beyond the walls.’

Kyrano stared at the image the hologram was holding.

‘Adept Nemonix, is the Binary Apostle aboard that Capitol Imperialis?’ he said.

Nemonix cocked his head to the side, as though receiving a fresh data stream.

‘He is,’ confirmed Nemonix. ‘Contained within a Manifold engine of dubious provenance and limited lifespan. But do not let that concern you. I can bombard that turn-plate to kill those Knights without leaving so much as a scratch on the transport.’

Kyrano nodded, and looked hard at Cordelia and the book she carried. She could see him weighing up the potential outcomes, the return of the Binary Apostle set against the loss of a knightly house and the knowledge of what he had done here spreading to the others.

‘The only proof Cadmus has is ink scratched on paper,’ said Nemonix. ‘Irrelevant and inadmissible to the Mechanicus.’

‘But just the kind of very human thing the minds of the knightly houses will trust more than any binaric record that says otherwise.’

Cordelia saw him make his decision in those words.

‘Lady Cordelia, I have no memory of setting this adept to this task,’ said Kyrano, ‘but I accept that I did. That Baron Roland has undoubtedly done the Mechanicus a great service is beyond question.’

‘Then call him off,’ demanded Cordelia.

‘Adept Nemonix,’ said Arch Magos Kyrano. ‘Any orders I have given you in relation to House Cadmus, I now rescind. I hereby sever any and all connections between us, and order you to vacate my forge-temple immediately.’

Nemonix nodded. ‘Very well, if that is your desire.’

‘It is,’ said Cordelia. ‘Now get out.’

Nemonix ignored her and said, ‘I accept your rescinding order, but I assure you, arch magos, this will set a precedent impossible to resist in future. You should prepare yourself for more of the knightly houses to follow the example you have allowed Cadmus to set.’

Kyrano watched the images of the Knights return, escorting the Capitol Imperialis through the outskirts of the city. Battered, bloodied, but unbowed.

The arch magos stepped aside, leaving a path for Nemonix to make his way from his forge-temple.

‘You may be right, Nemonix,’ he said, ‘But perhaps such a heroic example will be no bad thing.’

We return to Vondrak Prime through the very same gate we left. As Magna Preceptor, it is my right to enter the city first, but I order Aktis Bardolf and Tellurus to march at my side.

‘This victory belongs to us all,’ I tell them.

A deputation of the Mechanicus awaits us, three full companies of skitarii led by Arch Magos Kyrano. Malcolm’s Knights and a deputation of Sacristans form up in an honour guard, together with a host of nobility.

I see Cordelia and our consorts, bearing the house banners, and smile as I see her holding my personal heraldry.

The transfer of protection is made with almost unseemly haste, and Arch Magos Kyrano’s skitarii escort the lumbering, battle-scarred Capitol Imperialis towards his forge-temple.

House Hawkshroud follow it through the city, unwilling to abandon their duty of care until the final transfer of the Binary Apostle’s Manifold engine is complete.

Their devotion to duty is exemplary.

Despite my reservations on the durability of Sir Tellurus, he has survived the flight from Vikara. His armour is smoking and marches with painful steps, quite literally on its last legs. Whatever Sacristans he has will have their work cut out for them in making him battle-ready again.

Escorted by Malcolm’s Knights, we make our way through the streets to Verdus Ferrox. None of us speak, for it is obvious to those who have come to greet us that not all of those who set out have returned.

When we reach Verdus Ferrox, I am shocked at the damage I see. The tyranid hosts have not yet infested the city, but I see evidence of a terrible battle.

‘What happened here?’ I ask, as I walk my armour backwards into a repair berth. Sacristans swarm over it, disconnecting feed lines, locking it in the berth and preparing me for disconnection.

‘Just a wee skirmish,’ says Malcolm. ‘Some tyranid beasts thought they’d get a head start on their invasion. We had other ideas.’

I nod, wincing as the spinal plugs withdraw from my neck.

Stiff from so long in my armour, I clamber over the curved lip of my cowl, taking a moment to pull a bony hook left by the lictor free. I close my fist over it, thinking that it might make an interesting little trophy.

I climb down the rungs inset in the body of my armour and drop to the ground. My legs are unsteady, and my inner ear has not yet fully restored my sense of balance in a human frame.

Cordelia is there to support me. Her arm goes around my shoulder and she plants a kiss on my lips. She grimaces, perhaps tasting the last residue of the lictor’s blood.

‘You need a bath,’ she says. ‘You stink.’

I am about to answer her when I hear a crash of metal on stone. The sound sends adrenaline jolting through me, and I roll my shoulders before remembering I am no longer in my armour.

House Cadmus Sacristans rush to Sir Tellurus. His armour has finally given out under the strain. His mount lies on its side, sparking and convulsing like a man in the throes of a grand mal seizure.

With Cordelia still supporting me, I run to the fallen Knight. What the armour feels, the pilot feels, and the pain of such bio-feedback will be agonising.

‘Get him out of there!’ I shout. ‘Now!’

The Sacristans get to work on the shuddering Knight, and as I watch their efforts, I cannot help but think that Tellurus is resisting their efforts in some way.

Almost as though he does not want their help.

Then the canopy of the armour opens, and I see why Tellurus never speaks unless clad in armour. I understand in that moment something of what has driven Tellurus to become a Freeblade.

Sir Tellurus is not a sir at all.

Tellurus is a woman.

House Cadmus will not fight for Vondrak.

We answered a petition for aid, and have rendered unto the Mechanicus that which was asked of us. The Imperium will fight Hive Fleet Hydra, but it will fight it without House Cadmus. I do not make such a decision lightly, but after Cordelia informed me of the events taking place in my absence, I had no choice but to withdraw Cadmus from the conflict.

The warrior in me wants to kill Arch Magos Kyrano for what he has done, the lives he has cost my house, but, as ever, Cordelia is the cooling wind to my raging fire. I see that no good can come of such a confrontation, but from the ashes of Kyrano’s plotting, we have at least secured our independence from Mars forever.

I will carve the names of the fallen on the arch within the Vault Transcendent. To the dead of House Cadmus and House Hawkshroud, I will add the names of as many of the drill abbots and progena as I can discover. Without them, we would not have triumphed, and this honour is the least I can do them.

What has become of Adept Nemonix, I do not know. I doubt anyone on Vondrak knows. That he and his kind are considered necessary by the Mechanicus makes me doubly glad to be free of their interference.

Any organisation that relies on dishonourable means of enforcing its will is not worthy of my service. It will take a great deal of rebuilding before House Cadmus will answer another summons from the Mechanicus.

The Knights of House Hawkshroud have elected to remain on Vondrak. Aktis Bardolf and I have sworn binding oaths of brotherhood to unite our houses. When last I saw the Knights of Hawkshroud march, I was proud to see a Cadmus sigil borne upon their sword arms.

At Cordelia’s recommendation, I have not told Bardolf of Arch Magos Kyrano’s plot or how close we all came to annihilation at the hands of Nemonix.

Some things are better off unspoken.

And that is not all that will go unspoken.

In the wake of revelations concerning the true identity of Sir Tellurus, I sealed Verdus Ferrox and immediately ordered the Cadmus Sacristans to repair the Knight’s armour.

The last of her line, Tellia, as is her true name, sat upon her dead father’s Throne Mechanicus as Hive Fleet Hydra destroyed her home world and slaughtered the rest of her family. Rather than accepting her fate and letting death claim her, she fought back and escaped in a suit of Knight armour that resisted her control at every step.

It speaks volumes to her courage and character that she was able to pilot a suit of Knight armour without years of training, or going mad with pain at a connection without the correct input sockets drilled in her spine.

That a woman should be a pilot of a Knight goes against every tenet of knighthood and tradition. I should strip her of her armour and have her castigated for defiling millennia of tradition.

But I will not.

I owe Tellia my life, and I am bound by the same knightly code that should see her punished to honour my debt to her.

More than that, I admire her. I should not, but I do.

Cordelia has exacted a promise that I will never speak of Tellia, only of Tellurus. A hard promise to make, as deception is something every Knight of virtue abhors.

But in all my years of marriage to Cordelia, I have learned that when she sets her mind to something, it is best not to get in her way.

Sir Tellurus has also elected to remain on Vondrak, hoping to find and slay the tervigon beast that wiped out her line.

An honourable quest, but one I fear can only end badly.

House Cadmus is leaving Vondrak.

But there are always other enemies to fight, fresh wars in which to earn glory and renown.

I feel the call of my armour.

The Knights of Cadmus will march again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graham McNeill has written a host of novels for Black Library, including the ever popular Ultramarines and Iron Warriors series. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

To Anita, Evan and Amber of House McNeill.
My consort, my heir, my princess.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-475-6

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